In a Frame
by TheAfterglow
Summary: PostSeason IV finale AU Sarkney. Story starts approx. 2 yrs after Before the Flood, except that Vaughn is just Regular!Vaughn. What happens when an old friend shows up unexpectedly...
1. Chapter 1

She laid back, her right forearm next to her shoulder, and glanced at her wrist watch.

At least seven more minutes.

Sighing, Sydney rubbed her knuckles absently against the smooth, cool pillowcase next to her head, willing herself to be patient. God knows, patience wasn't really her strong suit.

The pillow under her hips made her middle back ache, and she doubled her knees up to her chest to release the tension. She remained rolled like a ball, her arms around her shins, and felt the knot in her back begin to ease.

Fifteen minutes like this at least, the doctor had said, would help. Michael was already in the shower, the hiss of the water filling the bathroom and spilling out into the master bedroom.

She stared at the shaft of light on the ceiling, streaming in through the southern window. It would be an agonizing drive to work this morning; sun delays made the LA freeways crawl.

_Lucky bastard_, she thought, listening to him splashing in the shower. It wasn't that she disliked the act, but she liked to clean up right away, too—didn't like the sticky wetness between her legs, at the top of her thighs. And she hated lying still after sex; it made her anxious, like a caged animal. She usually had the urge to fight someone after a good fuck.

_If you could even call that fucking_, she thought meanly. He had been so… _tender_ lately. It was not their way; she longed to slap him, have him bite her nipples, to claw at his back. There had been many days when she'd put her concealer on him to hide the bruises she'd left. This waiting had changed them, and she wasn't sure it was for the better.

5 more minutes.

_Michael, hurry up_, she thought, as she absently traced her fingers over the scar on her lower right abdomen. When had she started thinking of him as 'Michael'? She hadn't called him that before. Even after they had gotten together, she thought of him as Vaughn. Like she was one of the guys, one of the team--the kind of men who didn't have first names.

The shower stopped, and after some brief rustling that she assumed to be his toweling off, he appeared in the doorway to the bathroom.

"Hey," he said, grinning a little, "You holding up there?"

"Yeah," she replied, and tried to smile at him. She could feel her smile, a little too wane, and she looked away.

"Awwww," he crooned, sliding back under the covers with her with his towel on, "It's not that bad, is it? It's worth it- it'll be worth it, in the end." He looked at her, and kissed her temple before rolling away.

Two more minutes.

* * *

They listened to his iPod in the car, mostly guys-with-guitars stuff—David Grey, Jack Johnson, some Dave Matthews. The commute from their home was longer than it had been from either of their apartments, but she had grown used to it over the last couple years.

God, _years_, she thought, when we used to live so day-to-day. From when he had been her lifeline to sanity, meeting in that dank self storage unit to discuss her counter missions against SD-6, the fleeting glances, the words left unsaid, to this. This… normalcy.

It was, she mused, as normal as the life of two agents probably could be. To his mother, they were happy, bright, college-educated 30-somethings with a house in the 'burbs who'd met at their boring government jobs at State. Sydney didn't think it really matter to Mrs. Vaughn, what they did; they had two incomes, were upwardly mobile, and she finally had someone else to love, someone to replace Bill in the little triangle of their family that had been split apart when Michael was a child. Little did she know it was Sydney's own mother who'd murdered her precious Bill. That part she and Michael kept to themselves.

As John Mayer sang, "_Was there a second in time I looked around, did I sail through or drop my anchor down, was anything enough to kiss the ground, and say 'I'm here now'__1_" Sydney wondered briefly how a woman as dull as Michael's mother could have been married to his father- an agent himself- and produced a son as cunning as her husband. What was this song called? Clarity, she discovered after a glance at the iPod's scrolling screen. What a joke. Her mood was far more aggressive than this pop song. Pent up sexual tension, she told herself.

She sat up and turned the radio on instead; the classic rock station was tuned in. The plucky beat of a guitar tugged at her memory, and as she heard the words, "_I see a bad moon rising, I see trouble on the way__2_" she remembered—Sark.

That day up in the foothills- this song had been playing on her radio- trying to run him off the road in his Mercedes. He'd been so cocksure.

_No need to worry, Sydney- we're colleagues now__i_

She'd warned him- a warning that had, in the coming years, gone both unheeded and unfulfilled:

_You burn me, I burn you. _

So far though, it had been the other way around. Over and over again, until he'd disappeared, leaving Anna Espinoza in their custody nearly three years ago. Just like that jerk to leave his gal in the lurch, but she smiled at the memory.

_Hope you have got your things together, hope you are quite prepared to die—looks like we're in for nasty weather, one eye is taken for an eye…_

Sydney stowed her thoughts as they pulled into the cool darkness of the underground parking garage.

* * *

At their desks, they sorted emails and read briefs, occasionally exchanging glances of "This is some boring shit" with each other. She looked up from her monitor to rest her eyes, and she could feel some wetness between her thighs still, in her underwear. Damn, she hated that. When his cum ran out of her and made her underwear soggy? _Hated it_, she gritted her teeth.

"Sydney."

She jumped and turned to find her father standing over her with a black leather folder in his hand, embossed on the cover with the CIA logo.

"Did I… interrupt you?" he asked quietly.

"No!" she said, a little too quickly. She was slightly embarrassed that her dad had interrupted her thoughts about how she should go to the bathroom and wipe her crotch; she wasn't entirely sure he couldn't hear her very thoughts, sometimes. "It's fine- what's up?"

"We're having a briefing on some new intel we've just received from MI-5," he replied, "Be in the main conference room at 10 sharp."

"Right," she scribbled a note to herself, and turned back to the screen.

MI-5. British equivalent of the FBI. Usually they heard only from MI-6. Weird.

Her father proceeded to Vaughn's desk, and delivered what she assumed to be the same message. Her father… tolerated Vaughn. He'd grudgingly given his blessing to Vaughn, when Vaughn had asked for her hand in marriage. Marshall had filled her in later on how nervous Vaughn had been, ducking and dodging Marshall's attempts to horn in on their meeting.

"I'm so, like, DENSE," Marshall had waved his hands, "It's really, y'know, WEIRD how sometimes people can be really smart, like Einstein-smart, not just like, Bill Gates-smart- not that I'm comparing myself to Einstein in any way, shape or form- or Bill Gates, either—and be so dumb with… y'know, people stuff."

She'd nodded and smiled, then given him a hug. He was still a sweetie.

Now she wondered briefly why Vaughn had been nervous to ask her father to marry her- after all they'd been through. Sure, her dad could be a little condescending- ok, a LOT condescending- but Vaughn had done enough to earn his respect.

There was still time to run to the bathroom before they had to meet. She slipped into the ladies' room, into a stall and shoved her black pantyhose down.

* * *

They turned their attention to Jack when he rose from his leather chair at the head of the conference table.

"Yesterday at o-two-hundred hours," her father began, "Security cameras at London-Gatwick Airport picked up this man on their surveillance tapes in baggage."

The individual in the glossy still from the grainy security camera had on a baseball hat and mirrored-lens sunglasses. He wore a hooded sweatshirt, jeans, Adidas running shoes. It could've been anyone, any college student or miscellaneous piece of Euro trash copying David Beckham's metro sexual look, Sydney thought, except…

Sark. She immediately recognized him by his crooked lower lip and arrogant bearing.

Her father looked right at her as he slowly pronounced, "Julian Sark."

"Who?" one of the younger agents asked timidly. They were all a little afraid of Jack.

"Sark," she breathed, feeling a weird déjà vu sensation in the pit of her stomach after hearing Bad Moon Rising on the radio that same morning, "Or Julian Lazarey, since that's his real name. Andrian Lazarey's son. Or Peter Garo, whatever he's calling himself these days."

"Lazarey's son…." The newbie trailed off. "You mean-"

"Yes," her father impatiently cut off the newbie, "_that_ Lazarey." Although her "murder" of Lazarey was common knowledge about her missing two years at the hands of the Covenant, it was not really discussed. Most of the young agents hadn't yet grasped the intricacy of the whole Sark-Lazarey-Lauren-Sydney-Vaughn mess yet.

"I thought this guy was dead!" Weiss said in disbelief, "We haven't heard from him in three years."

"So, where is he now?" Vaughn finally spoke up.

"Wishful thinking, Agent Weiss," Jack replied, "MI-5 didn't get the tape until Sark was long gone. He could be anywhere. Best guess? He's gone back to England to finish up some unfinished business from his formative years there. As most of you know—" a pointed dig at the newbies who hated doing background research— "He attended a boarding school in western England, so we'll start there.

"Agent Weiss, pull all the files you can find on the boarding school, tuition payments, teacher names, grade reports, anything.

"Vaughn, I want you to coordinate with MI-5 to review surveillance feeds in and around Gatwick- the train stations, Tube, bus stations, taxi stands- maybe we can get a trace on where he's going, and where he's been."

"Sydney," his gaze fell on her, "You're feeling up to field work?"

"Of course," she said, steadily meeting his eyes. She hated showing weakness at work, especially in front of the newbies. They had no clue, anyway. "So I'm going after him?"

"Correct," Jack said his stare still steely, "It's a surveillance mission only. We don't have anything to bring him in on, but we want to find out where Mr. Sark has been these last years. We can bet it wasn't spent at a spa in Switzerland." Jack's lips twisted into a slow smile.

"Get to it," he dropped the smile.

* * *

Songs:

1 "Clarity." Heavier Things, John Mayer.

2 "Bad Moon Rising." Green River, Creedence Clearwater Revival.

* * *

Eps Quoted:

i Passage, Part I. Season 2, Episode 8. Written by Debra J. Fisher & Erica Messer.


	2. Chapter 2

On the plane, Sydney leaned her head back against the cream colored headrest and tried to concentrate on the thick file of pictures and reports they'd compiled for her to help track Sark. They had him at baggage, then at an ATM in the outskirts of London, then finally on a train platform in Oxford. After that…

She sighed and stared at the pictures. Then out the window. Her eyes closed momentarily, but she snapped them open. _Focus_, she commanded herself.

The last time they'd been on the plane, coming home… Mindlessly her eyes were drawn to the endless blackness outside the plane.

Four weeks ago. Had it only been four weeks? She doodled aimlessly on the edge of the paper with Sark's stats on it.

_Well, you're fine now_, she steeled herself. _Don't think about that_.

"Julian Alexsandr Sark (_neé_ Lazarey)" she read silently. "Born: March 11, 1978. Height: 6', Weight: 160 lbs (73 kg)approx, Hair: Blonde, Eyes: Blue. "

_Could he really be that young_, she wondered. She felt ancient compared to him. God, that meant that he'd barely been legal to order a drink, that first time she saw him in Moscow 7 years ago. She was 33, something Vaughn's mother reminded her of constantly.

_Ulgh_, she thought, _Mommie Dearest_.

"By the time I was your age, honey, " she muttered in a sing-song tone under her breath, "I had been married and had a son and was already a widow."

Mrs. Bill Vaughn needed a good fucking, she smiled.

And so does Mrs. Michael Vaughn, she thought as her smile dropped from her lips. She stared again out into the infinite ebony night, the stars still high above the plane.

The iPod, she thought, and drew the slender silver device from its holster in her bag. It was his, she noticed with a trace of dismay. She wished she'd had her own music, but she put the ear buds in anyway, and started one of the playlists.

Kate Bush's fragile, flighty soprano filled her ears: _I know you have a little life in you yet- I know you have a lotta strength left… _

Immediately, the song reminded her of Danny- her sweet Danny.

_All the things I shoulda said that I never said, all the things we shoulda done that we never did…__1_

_More__ like the things I never shoulda said that I DID say_, she thought, _the ones that got him killed_.

She drifted into a reverie; how crazed she'd been after he'd died. She had been… insane, a different person- desperate and stupid. He was her everything- her first, and she had hoped, her last love. So much for that. She'd never been that good with guys. In high school, in college- she was a nerd.

A nerd ripe for the picking, she thought, a bookworm too shy to speak to guys at parties until she was too drunk to make a good impression on them anyway. Danny had been tender, and in a good way. In the way a girl needs her first time around the Love Shack. He was also the first person she'd dated… on the _outside_. There had been several guys prior to him, but they were all affiliated with SD-6 in one way or another; cover, at least complete cover, wasn't necessary with them.

The song ended, and Dave Gahan's voice sang, whispery and dark, "Can you feel a little love?"

_As your bony fingers close around me long and spindly death becomes me heaven can you see what I see? _

Death. That specter that hung over them all, all the time at work. They were always one step from it, either the administration or the receipt of it. She had once liked to think, in a pat moralistic way, that the people they administered it to deserved it, but even that judgment was becoming increasingly grey for her.

_Payin' debt to karma, your body for a living, what you take won't kill you but careful what you're giving._

Yes.

_There's no time for hesitating, pain is ready, pain is waiting- primed to do its educating.__2_

Pain, like death, she surmised, kept them all going. Like Noah, her assassin. When he'd asked her to come to Fiji with him, she'd almost gone. The fear (fear, she'd once had sense to be afraid!) of Security Section tracking them down had kept her from it; little did she know how good her instincts had been on that one. She could still see in her mind the hurt, surprised look on his face when she'd pulled off the ski mask and revealed him as the Snowman, the assassin who'd been trying to kill her in that kitchen just as certainly as they'd killed each other the night they were holed up in that cabin.

_Can you feel a little love? Can you feel a little love? Dream on- dream on. . . _

The Depeche Mode song spooled itself out, and the iPod shuffled to a Peter Gabriel song.

_It was only one hour ago- it was all so different then- cuz nothing yet has really sunk in- looks like it always did, this flesh and bone…_

Sydney closed her eyes, again tracing the scar under the edge of her shirt. She couldn't remember that day, the day the Covenant had harvested her eggs on that side.

She and Vaughn. They were 50-50, a couple of cripples, she smiled to herself. She was missing half her eggs, and the virus that had nearly killed him, the antidote for which had lead to Plot Number One of Many to Kill Sloane, had left him all but sterile.

Vaughn was… a hoper, she thought. Was that even a word? Hoper? She didn't like to think she was hope-_less_, per say, but he certainly had a different outlook on things than she did. Like how they should settle down, maybe even quit the Agency, go into the WPP.

God, that had once been her reality, too. Back… before Danny. She'd imagined it: English teacher, married to a pediatrician, a couple of kids, a dog. No more SD-6. Before she'd learned there is no walking away from this life.

_Who'd take care of a dog now_, she wondered, _we_ _travel so much for work_.

_Life carries on and on and on and on, life carries on and on and on_, Peter sang. _This is the car that we ride in, the home we reside in, the face that we hide in, the way we are tied in__3_

She opened her eyes, and flicked off the iPod with a touch of her finger. She slid her wedding rings off and put them on the gold chain around her neck- she had never really worn jewelry on her fingers, especially in the field.

She flipped idly through the pages of Sark intel, and a handwritten scrap of paper fluttered out onto her lap.

"_Syd_," it read, in Vaughn's precise, slanting, masculine printing, "_I miss you already. Please come home safe. There'll be plenty more chances. V._"

She smiled, just a bit, that he signed it V and not M.

Yup. 50-50.

* * *

"Dude," Weiss's voice broke into Vaughn's daydream, "What is with you? Do we need to have a bitch session at the bar after work?" 

Vaughn looked up at Weiss's expectant face, flushed and not a little round. "Nah, I just worry about her, you know."

Weiss shoved his hands in his pockets and blew a lungful of air out expectantly. "Look, she's a big girl. She can take care of herself. You need to move past what happened the last time out. And this is just… surveillance. She's reporting back as needed. We'll know if she needs help."

Vaughn shrugged and inspected his keyboard. There was a crumb of something in between the T and the 6 keys.

"It's not her, it's Sark I'm worried about," he mumbled. Cocky little shit- he should've broken his head that time instead of just his arm and his nose.

"C'mon, Mike, if he'd wanted to hurt her, there were plenty of chances before now that he could've done it, and he hasn't.

"Have a little faith in her," Weiss concluded, and moved back to his desk.

* * *

Sydney holed up in the hotel room she'd been given for the night. She desperately wanted to sleep, but she had a hard time sleeping in hotels. Even on their honeymoon, she'd had trouble letting her guard down. Hotels were lonely places, she'd decided. They didn't belong to anyone. And if they didn't belong to anyone, the place had no loyalty, either- hotels were the kind of places where people could be murdered without context. A hotel didn't care if you were a mother, or a sister, or a husband. 

Sark was, as best as they could guess, in Cheltenham, likely in the vicinity of the Penbroke Boarding and Preparatory School for Boys. He'd spent most of his childhood and teen years there, as much as they knew, far from his father in Bucharest and mother, who they'd never been able to track down. Lazarey was most definitely pushing up daisies- Lauren and Sark had seen to that, but not before Lazarey had been tortured by his own son.

She shivered a little under her t-shirt and imagined what it would be like to be tortured by Jack. Scary, scary thought- she pushed it out of her mind.

The clunky pea green phone on the desk rang shrilly, its call echoing in the bare little room. It would be her confirmation call- the line was secure.

"Room service," her father's voice said.

"Wrong room," she replied from wrote, "I didn't order anything."

She replaced the receiver silently and stretched out on the brown and tan striped comforter. There were many hours left until dawn.

* * *

The next morning she moved out into the field, taking a train towards the Cotswolds. Her wig, a long straight blonde thing, was firmly in place, along with her glasses. She looked like an English country girl-next-door, an outfit complete with a jumper and a pair of corduroys. 

These pants made her ass look fat, she thought, as she examined her get-up in the tiny train bathroom mirror. Or was it….

_No_, she told herself, _no way_.

She shouldered her backpack as she entered the train car she'd been seated in and brushed past the elderly gentleman who'd ardently made conversation with her until she'd excused herself to the bathroom to disguise herself. He didn't look up from his London Standard.

The train rattled and shook its way through the eastern half of the country over the course of a couple hours. She hid her Sark file in a large textbook, and explained, "I'm studying for boards" to the woman across from her who was being too nosy.

Julian Sark, associate of Arvin Sloane, Irina Derevko, Kazari Bomani, Russian mafia, Covenant, Lauren Reed, Alliance, conspirator with K-Directorate.

What did they really _know_ about him, though? She always felt like he looked right through her, and she knew nothing about him. Did he sing in the shower? What kind of cologne did he wear? Girls? Boys? Both? She knew he'd bedded Francie's double, Allison Doren, and Lauren, but who knew what went on in a boys' boarding school. Where was his damn mother? Was she tied up in this whole mess, too?

She sighed in frustration. It was times like this that she and Vaughn had a parting of ways over the CIA's capabilities. He truly believed, she thought, that the government was a bumbling behemoth that was essentially trying to do the right thing, but always falling just that tiny bit short. She couldn't accept this shortcoming as easily; these people, they'd taken her _life_. Even her dad had a hand in that.

The train gave its initial jolt to signal that it would, eventually, slow to a stop.

She gathered her things, securing the file under the top lid of the giant European-style travel backpack, and slipping on some dark sunglasses.

* * *

Her first stop in Cheltenham was to check in with their local contact, a butcher named Nigel. Nigel was approximately 55, with an American wife and American sympathies, but an English sensibility for undercover work that so many of the newbies lacked, she mused. You needed to be cool. Collected. Lying like a snake in the grass, undetected, until you could strike with deadly force if needed. The Agency had recently recruited so many of these square-jawed frat-boy types, the ones who assumed spy work was like it was in the movies or on TV. She and Vaughn sometimes watched Le Femme Nikita, but they'd stopped after getting annoyed with its inaccuracies. 

Mostly, though, their assumption that Agency work was a career, something you chose and could back out of, needled at her.

"Syd," Nigel smooched her on each cheek but didn't touch her with his blood-stained hands. "Come on, love. It's good to see you."

They wound their way through his freezer room, past the dripping sides of beef and pork hung up by their ankles, to his business office in the back.

"How are you, darling?" he asked, concern clouding his eyes. "I heard you got a bit banged up your last time out."

_God, did they publish that ops report on the damn Internet_? She wondered. This was the other thing the newbies didn't realize yet- nothing is private. She knew about their outings to strip clubs, how the boldest one with the filthy mouth was a closet homo, how the other one secretly loved Joni Mitchell but would never admit it to The Guys.

"It's fine," she assured him, "I'm here, right?"

He smiled and wiped his hands on an already-stained handkerchief. "That's the spirit- buck up and you won't feel so punk, my mum told me."

"Awright," he continued, pulling a file from under his desk calendar and handing it over to her. "I was able to get some photos of your Mr. Sark- he got into town maybe a day or two ago? As near as anyone can figure, he's holed up at this manor about 4 miles out of town," he stabbed his fat, stubby finger on the map included in the file. "It's fairly secluded," he warned her, "You may have trouble getting near enough to get any intel without being noticed."

She shrugged, and looked at the photos. These were better than the Gatwick security camera; Nigel prided himself on his photography, especially with a long-range lens.

"Spent a few years in Africa in the Army Corps," he'd told her once, with the proud bearing of an ex-military man, "Shooting game- literally and figuratively."

"Does the house belong to someone here?"

"No," Nigel shook his head, "The name on the title is a Ms. Natashya Lorien, but no one around here knows her, when the house was purchased, if anyone lives there, any of that. It was assumed by many to be empty."

"Guards?"

"Not that I could see," he concluded, "You can see I got some pictures of the house."

Indeed, Sydney noticed, were those… horses? The house was large, but not overly so. And hardly opulent. A modest country manor of some kind.

"Ok, Nigel," she stood and shook his hand, "This is a good start."

"Do you want to check in, love?" Nigel asked, hesitant.

"No. I'm off comms and on my own this time—check in only as needed," she smiled sweetly at him. She was relieved to have a break from everyone watching her. It was like she had been a specimen these last few weeks, some kind of alien being that needed to be studied to be understood.

He nodded, silent. "Just be careful. I read his file- he's a nasty little bugger."

* * *

Songs: 

1 "This Woman's Work." The Sensual World, Kate Bush.

2 "Dream On." Exciter, Depeche Mode.

3 "I Grieve". Up, Peter Gabriel.


	3. Chapter 3

Sark couldn't have picked a better place to hide out, she mused as she walked through the downtown of Cheltenham. The place was crawling with tourists, mostly American college students, from what she could tell. She checked herself into a bed and breakfast on the outskirts of town for that night, one that could only be described as "impossibly cute" in a travel guide, and rented a bicycle from the kind couple who seemed overly concerned that she was a young American woman traveling alone.

"Don't worry, I know ka-raat-tay," she'd joked with them. They loved _Friends_, it turned out, and got the reference to Ross's fictitious exercises to relieve his sexual tension when Carol had turned out to be a lesbian.

Now she wore a sleek, dark bob, and was wearing good fitting sneakers (hah, sneakers, she laughed as she put them on) in case she had to run. Sunglasses in place, backpack with camera, a bottle of water, a piece of bread with butter and cheese that the couple had forced on her, and of course, her extra gun. Her regular was stashed firmly in her shoulder harness, under the zip-up hoodie she was wearing. She didn't care for how it pressed into the soft part of her left side when she pedaled the bike uphill, but the safety was on. No use in shooting her good side with her own gun.

She biked up the macadam road, up away from the town and into the rolling hills surrounding it. The driveway for the manor, as nearly as she could tell, was quite long, and was guarded by a pillar with a stone fox atop it.

She ditched the bike in a hedgerow and entered the woods at the side of the property. Her senses were on full alert, now- who knew what was in the brush, in the trees. The satellite scans of the area had been cold, but…

Closer, closer, closer she crept, walking heel to toe to keep from crunching in the underbrush.

The forest was growing lighter with each step- she was reaching the edge. _Get low_, she heard her father's deep voice in her head, as if he'd been right there along with her.

Slow and slower she crawled to the edge of the trees, and then finally hid behind a clump of long grass. The forest gave way to a gentle slope down to the property where the manor and outbuildings stood.

She pulled her camera from the bag, and screwed the telephoto lens firmly into place. Through it, she could make out a sandy rectangle of earth behind the house, next to where some horses were grazing and swishing their tails in a pasture. So those _were_ horses in Nigel's pictures, she thought. Someone must live here, they look well taken care of. She hated when people abused animals. That show, Animal Cops on the Animal Planet, broke her heart.

As if on cue, a horse and rider appeared out of the woods at the back of the property. Was it- her heart beat slightly faster- _yes_.

Through the lens she watched, watched the horse's every stride as it strode towards the arena. It was a large grey, with a mane shorn so that it stuck up like the crest on Roman soldier's helmet, and small ovals of darker color in its coat, mostly on its legs and flanks. What were those spots called, she wracked her brain. Dapples? That sounded right.

It was Sark. No helmet, she noticed, that didn't seem too bright. He rode into the arena, the grey swinging its long neck from side to side ever so slightly on the loose rein. He wore gloves, the tall black boots, little silver spurs. He didn't know he had an audience, she grinned. Sark seemed barely older than the last time she'd seen him. His blonde hair was still shorn quite close, but his skin on his face and arms seemed very tan. Maybe it was the light- the sun was starting to fade into the line of the horizon. Either way, unfair. Men had it easier.

After a time or two around the arena, and a few photos had been snapped, Sark gathered up the horse's reins until they seemed, to Sydney, to be impossibly short for the horse's long neck to be comfortable. But the horse responded, curling itself into what seemed like a terribly tight frame, like a spring being wound up. It swished its tail and stepped off into a canter, apparently at an aide from him that was imperceptible to her, at this distance and to her untrained eye.

They rode around the edge of the arena, past letters marked distinctly in black on painted white squares of plywood: A-F-B-M-C-H-E-K and back to F again before cutting, diagonally, across the arena towards H. The horse shook its head slightly, and started… it looked like skipping to her. It threw front legs out and hopped into the air with every stride, the bend of its body changing left-right-left-right-left-right depending on which front leg it pushed out first. Sark's body barely moved in the saddle, she noticed, so it must not be as bumpy as it looked.

They reached F, and the horse settled on being bent to the right. They reached M in a few powerful springy strides and went diagonally again, this time towards K. But this time, the horse didn't skip- about a quarter of the way across the area, it bent strongly right and started pivoting around its right hind leg. She frowned, not sure of the point of this exercise. The horse didn't look uncomfortable, though- no, its ears were placidly to the sides and occasionally flicked back towards Sark- was he talking to it?- and it lowered its hindquarters so that its front end could swing around. In 6 strides it had completed the pirouette, and they were striding towards K at full steam.

The horse hopped again at A, and bent this time to the left- the pair left the edge at F and repeated the pirouette to the other direction, this time with less labor, it appeared. Sydney realized she'd forgotten to take any pictures. Just as they came out of the left pirouette, she snapped a shot that captured the absolute concentration on Sark and the horse's face.

They made it to H and the horse hopped again, back to the right. They cut up the center of the arena, leaving the rail at C, and in the dead center (X marks the spot, Sydney almost giggled out loud) they stopped. The horse, she noted, hadn't slowed down so much as it had simply ceased to move forward. It was still wound up tight, ready to strike off at Sark's command, but instead, he leaned forward and… caressed its neck with his closed, gloved hand without releasing the grey from the tight rein. The horse blinked and chewed, a glob of white foamy saliva dripping from its mouth.

Sark let the reins slide through his gloved fingers then, as the grey unwound from its tight frame; she was amazed how much longer the horse seemed. It shook its head and scratched its front leg with its lips as it walked languidly forward.

After what was ostensibly a walk to relax the horse's muscles- since it didn't appear sweated- they stopped again and Sark dismounted, his boots raising a tiny puff of dust when they hit the sand. He walked beside the horse into the dark of the barn, without a hand on its reins then, and they were out of her sight.

* * *

She lie very still, trying not to shiver, and waiting for the cover of dark. Her head itched under the wig. He'd left the barn some time ago, after turning off the lights and releasing the grey back into the pasture with the other horses. The grey had kicked up its heels and run over to a dark brown horse with a black mane and tail. The two had stood, nose-to-tail, biting at each other's necks, before the grey had wheeled and kicked the brown one solidly in the shoulder before running off, snorting and squealing.

He'd stood at the gate, watching, and she thought she saw him smile through her binoculars. It wasn't as creepy as when Sloane smiled, she thought, at least Sark had a sense of humor.

Boring so far, she told herself. So Sark likes horses? Somewhat unsurprising for a guy who'd been raised in England, she thought. After Charles had married Camilla, one of the newbies had sent around an email joke back at the Ops Center, a picture with the caption, "Charles meets Camilla for the first time". Someone had altered a photo of the prince in hunt garb, sitting on a white horse, so that the horse's eyes and mouth had Camilla's features pasted over them. Cute, in a cruel kind of way.

The light in the upstairs of the house finally flicked off, and she sighed. It was time.

She would go in the barn first, she had decided. No sense in risking the house this early in the mission. She crept slowly down the hill, darting between trees and the occasional large boulder.

Once inside, she drew her gun and clicked the safety off. It was very dark inside the barn. She could taste the smell of manure on her tongue, mingled with the sweet grassy smell of hay and what smelled like… soap? Ok, even horses needed baths, she supposed. Down the main aisle past the stalls, to a room with a door.

She eased the doorknob to the right, and froze when it squeaked under her touch. She was beginning to sweat a little under her arms. Deep breath, deep belly breath.

The door swung soundlessly inward to reveal a small, square room full of…

Saddles. And bridles. They were hung neatly on pegs, covers on the saddles, the bridles on racks lining the far wall. The metal mouthpieces of the bridles glinted in the moonlight coming through the small, high window. Everything looked well taken care of, she noted. And nothing seemed suspicious.

She licked her lower lip and tasted dust as she eased the door closed again. Just as the latch clicked into the frame of the door, she heard the safety of a gun click off behind her head.

"What a pleasant surprise, Agent Bristow," he purred in his silky British accent, pressing the barrel of his gun to the nape of her neck.

"Sark."

The circle of cold metal was raising the hairs on the backs of her arms under her sweatshirt.

"Turn around, slowly," he commanded evenly, "And put your safety on."

"Alright," she acquiesced, her thumb on the butt of her gun. She was a good negotiator, but… she turned, digging her right heel into the dirt.

She was met with his smirk as he pressed the gun into her shoulder. "I see your spy skills are ever evolving," he taunted her. "I spotted you in the woods while I was out hacking with my horse."

"Cute wig," he touched her hair, his free hand so close to her cheek that she could feel the heat, "Though I don't think it's really your color."

The last thing she remembered seeing, after his hand next to her cheekbone, was the little silver buckle on the strap of his spurs as her cheek hit the dirt floor of the barn and she succumbed to the darkness.


	4. Chapter 4

_Click_.

A light snapped on in front of her.

Her head throbbed, dull and thick, where he'd pistol whipped her. She willed herself to raise her head and look up, but her head was heavy, so heavy. She was seated in a chair, her arms and legs tied to the arms and feet. A fairly nice chair, she noticed. A sturdy chair.

"Agent Bristow," Sark said, accenting the 's' in the middle of her name like a hissing snake. "You've been napping on the job again."

His hand slid under her chin, forcing it up so she had to look him in the eye. He'd changed out of his riding clothes, into some khakis and a black button down. "To what do I owe the pleasure of seeing you here?"

"None of your damn business," she mumbled, but she wasn't sure it was really coherent.

"Oh, but it is!" he smiled, "I'm afraid your spying on me while at my home makes it very much my business."

He held her chin still, stoking her throat with his forefinger. "Sorry for the immediate violence," he said insincerely, "But I have been known to shoot intruders on sight. This was your lucky day, I suppose."

"Hm," he made the small noise in his throat, "You appear to be alone."

She stared defiantly at him and pressed her lips together. She could taste blood- her lip felt a little swollen.

"You _are_ alone," he concluded. "Not even your precious husband to back you up? Do you still go out on missions together?" he chuckled. "I would think the Agency would have a rule against that. They have so many irritating rules."

He circled her chair, slowly, like a cat playing with a frog in the weeds. She could feel his presence behind her, even though she couldn't hear his steps. It was like her body had a force field around it that had been invaded.

"You don't wear your wedding bands, I see- that's probably wise. The stone might weigh you down in the field.

"So…." He said slowly, hissing again the 's', "How is it, then?"

"How is what?" She stared straight ahead without blinking.

"You know…" He said it like she was playing dumb with him, "The married life."

"I'm sure you didn't tie me up to talk about this," she said evenly. She felt a little weird, realizing that the last time they'd seen each other they'd both been single.

"Well, what else are we going to talk about?" Sark stepped around in front of her and smiled, his eyes nearly Curacao blue in the lamplight. He _was_ very tan. "Married people tend to be boring that way."

"This is how I've imagined it," he started, "You. Michael Vaughn. A house in LA. Cars… two?" he guessed, "Probably domestic ones. A…." he pressed his lips together like he was forming a 'b', "…a dog- Vaughn seems the Labrador Retriever type, don't you think?"

"There's no dog."

"Ah!" he breathed. "But you'd like one."

She shrugged as much as her bonds would allow.

"Or perhaps… not a dog..."

_Don't say it, you asshole, don't you dare. _

"A baby?"

"That's even less of your business than what I'm doing here," she said, trying not to let irritation creep into her voice.

He smiled, a slow smile that caused dimple to form in the center of his left cheek. "You're not the only one who spies on old friends, Sydney," and he clicked off the light.

* * *

She sat in the darkness, waiting for her eyes to adjust. She was inside the house now, and he'd closed and locked the door behind him after turning off the light.

_Asshole, evil asshole_, she thought, _he'd been spying on her and Vaughn_?

_Nothing is private_, she'd hissed at Vaughn that day in the shady little bar in LA five years ago, when she'd hunted him down, to warn him he was being investigated as a rogue agent. Little had she known he was trying to protect her, figure out her mother's endgame before they fell victim to it. Even Vaughn's exhaustive search hadn't been able to turn up the plan Irina had devised a year ahead of time, with Sark and Sloane to aid her.

She had never been sure what relationship her mother had had to Sark, prior to Irina's surrender to the CIA. He was her associate, certainly, but was he her protégé? Her lover? She shivered. Sark would've been a teenager when her mother took him under her wing. Totally statutory.

She hated it that she knew so little about him, when he seemed to be able to read her thoughts like that. He was so… right. The way he'd drawn out their little suburban life in LA. He had it all right, down to the dog they kept putting off and the baby they couldn't seem to have.

_Well…that was half-truth, _and she knew it.

So much for secrets between husband and wife, she thought sourly. Everyone at the Agency knew what had happened, Nigel knew, even SARK knew, for God's sake. She needed to ask Marshall to put stronger encryption on the report cache.

Her eyes didn't seem to be getting any better in the darkness. There was no outside light in the room.

* * *

The shit had hit the fan on the plane back from Chechnya, four weeks back. The mission had gone well- they were in and out of the prison they'd raided to extract a political prisoner. There had been a scuffle with a guard, and he'd been able to land a solid punch to her gut. It had knocked the wind out of her, but she'd gritted her teeth and knocked him out with her pistol, then shot him with a tranq for good measure.

Hours later, she'd been curled in the seat of the plane, dozing next to Vaughn, across from Weiss, when she first felt a twinge.

The twinge turned into an outright ache below her belly button, one that seemed to go through her to her spine, almost, but she'd squeezed her eyelids shut and tried to zen herself out of it.

She was about to take some ibuprofen when she first felt the wetness in her underwear. _Uh oh._

She'd staggered up from the plane seat, and lurched towards the tiny plane bathroom—there was some turbulence—and had nearly vomited as the pain worsened, seeming to go down her inner thighs to her knees, almost, making them so weak she barely made it to the bathroom and shut the door behind her.

She had doubled over, sitting on the toilet, trying not to stare at the bright red blood dripping from her. It was so heavy it had already soaked through her jeans- she wondered, dimly, in an embarrassed 7th grade 'I just got my period' kind of way, if the guys had seen it as she stood up - and tried not to shudder as the pain worsened. Then the plane pitched, and she pitched forward with it, knocking her head on the door and passing out.

When she woke, she was in a hospital gown and she felt weak, so weak. There was an IV drip of blood into her left arm- the nurse had done a shitty job with the needle, she would be bruised for sure- and Vaughn was at her side.

"Syd," he breathed, "Are you awake?"

She had blinked once, twice. _Yes_.

"You're going to be OK."

He looked so worried, and so tired. How long had it been since she'd passed out on the plane? She noticed the pain in her abdomen had subsided.

"Syd, we're in Maryland," he had explained slowly, "We couldn't make it all the way back to LA without getting you medical attention. Do you remember passing out?"

She blinked again. _Yes_.

"You…" his brow furrowed into its characteristic four wrinkles, "You had a miscarriage."

_Yes_.

A long moment, more than a moment--probably minutes--of silence had stretched out between them then. He wouldn't meet her eyes, instead rubbing her limp fingers with his own. He was rubbing them a bit too hard, but she didn't flinch or move them away.

"Michael," she'd croaked when she couldn't stand the horrible pregnant silence any longer, "I was going to tell you."

"Really?" his voice was surprisingly strong when he was angry. "When, when it was born?"

He'd stood suddenly then, and left her alone.

She hadn't meant to hurt him like that- really. _Really_. It was just… the uncertainty of it all. Their entire situation, the pregnancy, she'd only been two and a half months along, she didn't want to give up her field work. Not so soon. It wasn't like it was a _baby_, not yet; at least, not to her. It was more like an annoying stomach flu that she couldn't shake.

The only way a secret could be kept, anyway, was if only she knew.

* * *

It was after that incident that everything had gotten so… _weird_ between her and Vaughn, she had decided. They hadn't been actively trying—yet-- to get pregnant, she'd forgotten to take her birth control a time or two in the previous month and by some kind of miracle, one of her remaining eggs and his sparse swimmers had hooked up for a little party.

She thought, as she hung her head in the darkness, about the episode of Sex & the City where Miranda gave her ex, Steve, a mercy fuck and had managed to get pregnant despite his only having one testicle and her having a lazy ovary.

They were 50-50, too.

_Nice job, Syd_, she abused herself.

There was, she had observed, a darkness about her that Vaughn didn't possess. She liked to be secretive, and not just about little things.

_Little things… like being pregnant, _she thought sarcastically.

She liked having secrets. And since everything else was public, the only one she could keep secrets from was him. It wasn't a new thing; ever since she was a little kid, she'd had secrets.

Like when they'd learned about The Danger of Guns in grade school, and she resisted the urge to shout to everyone how her dad had taught her to assemble a handgun with a blindfold on.

It was their secret game. Just she and Jack. Her Spy Daddy, she smiled in the dark, wincing as her lip puffed up even further.

The violence in their bed—that was her doing, not his-- his gentleness held no currency in her world. Everything around her was brutal. How did he expect her to enjoy him when his touch was so light she could barely feel it?

She remembered, dimly through her headache, the first time she'd schooled him. They were in her apartment, rolling around on her bed. That was before they'd discovered the bug in the VCR, the one that Allison Doren had planted there.

_Shit_, she realized, Sark had probably seen the tapes too. Allison had been working for him. _Sicko_! Sure, so she did like it rough, but she wasn't a voyeur. That, she told herself, was beneath her. She got it enough not to need to watch someone else.

They had been tickling each other, and although she was laughing, she was growing steadily more frustrated at how unaroused she was by the whole episode. She was straddling him, her powerful legs doubled up, when he had sat up and tried to kiss her breasts through her t-shirt. She'd curled her forefinger under his chin, raised his face to hers, and kissed his mouth- but wouldn't let go of his bottom lip until he'd jerked back in pain and surprise.

"Syd!" he'd exclaimed, touching his lower lip with his fingers in disbelief, "You drew blood."

When he'd looked up, she'd met his gaze, steadily and insistently, pleading with her eyes, _hit me. You know you want to. Go on._

He'd slapped her bottom then, lightly, playfully, like he thought she was kidding.

_No, like this_, she'd thought, and she slapped him full across the face.

He'd lain with his face turned to his right for a second, stunned, before he met her eyes again. Then he'd grabbed her and pinned her down.

_Yes, yes!_ _Good boy_, she thought as he'd ripped her shirt off and ravished her.


	5. Chapter 5

Back in the darkness, she was mildly disconcerted by how much the memory of it had aroused her, and by how unlike that episode their sex had been in the last month.

He'd dragged her to several fertility doctors to make sure she wasn't permanently damaged by the miscarriage. And of course, she wasn't- that would be too easy- and now they were back to his way, his tender, considerate, aimless way of lovemaking that drove her right out of her very mind.

Worse, everyone at work somehow knew about it. She knew a select few people had seen the tape from the VCR- Marshall, her father, Director Kendall, she and Vaughn, Weiss- when they'd found it, but after the Chechnya incident she'd come back to her desk to find a mock-up of a porn video, "One Night in Sydney."

She'd stared at it, feeling her blood pressure drop instantaneously like it did when she got dangerously angry. The fake box had a still shot of them on her bed, grainy from the VCR tape. There were some titters from Newbieville, and she'd shot daggers in their direction before dumping the box in the trash.

The titters had become howls of laughter.

"How come those amateur porno queens are always named for cities?" Closet Homo Newbie had asked, "We've had One Night in Paris, One Night in Chyna, and now, One Night in Sydney!"

She'd walked evenly to the bathroom, shaking with rage. That they would compare her to that blonde bimbo heiress, or the freakishly mannish Chyna Doll. Didn't they have the sense to know she could kill them if she'd wanted to?

She'd pressed a wet paper towel to the back of her neck, under her long hair, hoping her blood pressure would come back to normal. It always did this, this uncontrollable swing, when she got super angry. Of course she'd been conditioned to be able to control her BP so she could fake lie detector tests, but this was different.

Then, the icing on her cake: a pudgy middle-aged secretary, Alice, had emerged from one of the stalls and started giving her advice on how to get pregnant.

"Sometimes it takes awhile, honey," Alice said sympathetically, "It took Merv and me almost a year."

"Right," she'd replied, forcing herself to smile, "It'll be fine."

"I'm so sorry about your loss," Alice had whispered, rubbing Sydney's upper arms with her still damp hands. "But you're strong- way stronger than I ever was."

Indeed. She would have to be, to withstand the kind of humiliation she faced at the hands of her own coworkers.

* * *

_Click. _

Sark flicked the light on in the same movement as he sat in front of her on an armchair not dissimilar to the one she was strapped to.

Her headache had begun to ease; instead of a sharp, throbbing pain where the butt of his gun had hit her temple, there was merely a dull ache. They stared at each other for what felt like eternity.

He was what, 27? By that age, most people had a few wrinkles, usually the beginnings of crow's feet at the corners of their eyes, little pre-smile lines at the edges of their mouths. His skin was very smooth, she noticed, and he had no stubble.

Probably because he's barely old enough to have facial hair, she smirked silently. His blonde hair was shorn very short, much shorter that the first few times she'd faced him. And his eyes; they were still that burning, bright electric blue, like a gas flame. She wondered briefly if his mother had been pretty. Goodness knows, Lazarey wasn't that much of a looker. Weird to think that he had parents at all.

She longed to slouch in the chair, but he'd tied her forearms so tight that she couldn't scrunch down very much. He, on the other hand, sprawled in the chair, his legs crossed at the ankles. He was barefoot, his long, narrow feet and toes exposed. He was at home.

Damn him for being so comfortable when she was miserable. Hunger was starting to ping her stomach, and she felt shaky. Why hadn't she eaten a larger breakfast? Mrs. Curran had been trying to load her up with more English breakfast than she could stomach.

"You're kind of a grouch when your blood sugar is low," Vaughn had observed once.

Indeed. She felt her bitchiness growing with each passing hour without food. How long had she been here before he'd woken her up?

They stared into each other's eyes, but without any sense of clichéd sentiment. They were like animals, trying to stare each other down. Seeing who would turn tail and run back to his foxhole.

To her surprise, Sark closed his eyes first.

"So are you going to say something?" she finally asked.

"I didn't want to be rude," Sark pronounced. "Give you a chance to ask some questions of your own."

Some questions? Fucker. Why did you kill my best friend? Were you my mother's lover? Where the FUCK have you been since you sold Anna out and took off?

"Um…. You ride horses?" she said, lamely.

"Yes."

_O-kaaaay…_

"But you don't live here…Who takes care of them when you're gone?" She fervently hoped they were being taken care of.

"I have a neighbor girl in my employ," he replied, "A 16-year old filly, completely horse crazed, and a much better equestrian than I am. She could ride the pants off me," he admitted.

"In fact…" his weird lower lip flicked upwards, "She has a time or two."

"You're sick, you know that?" She couldn't--but yet completely could--believe that he'd take advantage of a teenager. SICKO.

"Oh, she was more than willing," he assured her, leaning forward in his chair and resting his elbows on his knees, "I _am _many vile things, but a rapist is not one of them, Sydney."

"You ought to take comfort in that, given your present state of capture."

She averted her eyes from his steady gaze. She had kissed him, once; they had been on a mission before he had evaded their custody, and she had had to dress up like… Lauren.

Vaughn's now-deceased wife. Who had been fucking Sark on the side in some kind of sick double-agent love triangle.

Sitting on his lap in the club, there'd been some banter about the two of them, Sark and "Lauren", giving their contact a private show upstairs. Instead, she'd kissed him, taking a lime from a round of shots from his lips and leaving him with a bloody lip from her teeth.

She remembered how he'd grabbed her a little tighter around the waist as she'd bit him, but not drawn away. He was too good an operative to give them away, or…

"I don't know what you'd want with me," she finally retorted, "A boring old married woman."

He smiled at that, a real smile. "So, being married to Vaughn _is_ as boring as I'd heard."

They resumed the staring contest.

"What are you doing here," she asked after several minutes. "You let us find you."

"Hm," he considered, "I'm afraid that's need-to-know," he smiled at her again, reminding her of that infuriating day when she thought she'd handed Sloane over to him to be killed, only to have them form a strategic alliance.

He'd been so smug that day in the conference room at SD-6. Had he actually been mocking her in Tokyo, when she'd rendered Sloane unconscious- "You are so good, you know that, don't you?" His voice had quickened over her comm when she started calling for the ambulance.

_Click._

_

* * *

_

This was bullshit, she decided, she needed to get out of here. What had he tied her with? Leather? Were these… reins? She bent over towards her arm as much as she could. Could she chew through a leather rein?

No matter, she couldn't get close enough to get her teeth on it. But, as she leaned forward, she noticed—her necklace with her rings was no longer around her neck.

_Great. _

He'd taken her rings? Why?

_Ridiculous_, she ridiculed herself, _that you can't even get out of this. First mission out after… that… and you get captured, tied to a chair by your mortal enemy, and he steals your wedding rings. Perfect. _

As if her thoughts had willed him back, the door opened right then. She could make out his silhouette in the doorway, backlit by the hall light.

"Sydney." He purred her name.

"What."

"Are you hungry?"

_What? _

"Well?" his voice broke into her confusion. "Are you hungry or not?"

"Yes," she admitted, more readily that she'd intended.

He entered the room without turning the lamp on again, and she heard him slide his gun into his waistband. Maybe he'd forgotten to put the safety on and would shoot himself in the crotch, she thought cruelly. My, hunger did make her bitchy. Actually, that would be the worst possible outcome—then she'd be forced to take care of him. No way.

"I suppose I can't treat you any worse that I treat my horses," he surmised, "Which, luckily for you, is quite well."

He untied the leather straps around her shins first, then drew his gun as he undid her wrists. She was unarmed. He'd taken her gun, and her hunger made her doubt whether she was strong enough to take him hand-to-hand.

"Stand up," he commanded, again pressing his gun into her neck, "Slowly."

She obeyed, and kept her palms open, and at the level of her shoulders. He was at least a half a head taller than she was.

"Upstairs, please."

Ok, so they were in the basement, no wonder there were no windows, she thought. Maybe once she had her strength back she could kick his ass and escape.

Up the carpeted stairs into, to her surprise, what appeared to be a well-decorated living room. There were oil paintings of horses on the hunt on the walls, and the brown leather couches were well worn but still had life in them. A rich, tightly woven Oriental rug covered the creaking wood floor, a dizzying pattern of reds, oranges, cream and dark blues.

"This house isn't mine," he said. "It belongs to my sister, Natashya."

_He had a sister_? How could the CIA not have… Nevermind. There was so much they didn't know about their marks, she had ceased to wonder.

"Half-sister, actually," he corrected himself, guiding her into the kitchen, "She is my father's daughter. Born to his wife."

She had worked with Lazarey, in her missing years at the hands of the Covenant. Still she'd had no idea Sark had been his son.

"Whereas I," he continued, "Am the product of a happy…accident with my father's mistress."

He seated her at the kitchen table, in front of a bowl of what appeared to be some kind of soup.

"Wine?" he asked, politely. He held up a balloon glass, obviously intended for red. Red was not her first choice; he should have known that if he knew so damn much about her. She was kind of a lightweight.

"Whatever."

He poured her a larger glass than she would've liked, especially given her hunger and the apparently nature of the soup, some kind of tomato-based vegetable. She squinted towards the label- Chateau Petruse, 1982. What else did he drink?

"_Bon Appetit_," he said, "Or _Guten Appetit_, if you prefer."

She ravished the soup like a person who hadn't eaten in days. Ever since the Covenant had held her, barely feeding her, trying to break her down, she had been able to force herself to eat almost anything.

"Sydney," he chuckled, "You appear to be famished. You should've said something earlier."

He took a generous slug of the wine. And watched her. It made her a little uncomfortable, his characteristic amused-but-terribly-bored expression, like nothing in his life was really interesting enough to keep him entertained for more than a second or two. This was his default setting. The only time she saw any different was when they were in the field, when he was torturing someone, shooting at someone, or otherwise generally being a murderous assh—

"My condolences on your… loss," he offered, not completely sincerely but with a trace of 'I need to form a bond with you so I can use you for something later' in his voice.

"If you can't say anything nice," she spat, sounding like her mother, "Don't say anything at all."

"My apologies, then," he shrugged and sipped the wine. "I didn't realize you were so deeply affected by your little mishap. How is Agent Vaughn taking it?" He paused for a second, thoughtful, "Though I suppose, _you_ would be 'Agent Vaughn' now as well. Or did you retain your maiden name?"

What was he doing? She glared at him over her bowl of soup. She couldn't believe they were having this kind of conversation. Like he… _knew_ her. Instead of being someone who periodically tried to kill her.

"I still go by Bristow."

He nodded, one jerk of his chin towards her. "So why did you come here? To kill me? Finish me off? That hasn't been terribly successful in the past now, has it?"

"Surveillance."

"It's been fairly boring thus far then, hasn't it," he nodded. "I can't always be up to something heart-quickening."

She stared at him. "Where are my rings?"

His eyebrows shot up, and the bored expression dropped from his face. "These?" he asked, reaching into his pocket and drawing out her chain with the rings. "I'm afraid I need some collateral from you. To make sure you don't take off on me."

She willed herself to keep still, not to snatch them away from him as he traced his forefinger around the inside of the wedding band. Did he really think her rings were enough to keep her there?

"It would drive him mad," he began, "To know that you were with me as well, now, wouldn't it?" his lips quirked upwards, "Especially now that you're trying to start a family."

_Asshole, asshole, asshole_. He intended to send her rings to Michael? What would that prove? Vaughn had better sense than to believe she'd willingly sleep with Sark, didn't he?

"He knows me better than that," she shot back at Sark. "That it's an idle threat."

"Sydney," Sark laughed, "You should know by now that torture doesn't have to be physical to be effective… It is the anticipation of pain as much as the actuality of it that does subjects in."

Her head was feeling heavy again. She had eaten too fast; no—had he drugged her wine? Or was she really that much of a lightweight? She couldn't tell.

"It won't… work…" her head nodded to her chest, despite her efforts not to let it.

"We'll see about that," was the last thing she heard.


	6. Chapter 6

There was light streaming through the gauzy curtains across the bed she lay in, when she finally woke.

She wasn't under the covers, and she was still clothed. Wasn't she? Had he… her fingers fluttered over the button of her jeans.

No.

_Whew. _

She propped herself up on one elbow, and glanced around the room. She was upstairs, in a smallish bedroom. It was sparse, with a bedside table with a drawer next to it. There was a hardcover novel on the table, a bookmark in its pages.

Had he left it there? She rolled onto her stomach and rutched towards the table, grabbing the book. At the bookmarked page, she read:

_I promised to tell you how one falls in love. _

Ok, not Sark's, she decided, but kept reading.

_When I met Katharine she was married. A married woman. Clifton climbed out of the plane and then, unexpected, for we had planned the expedition with just him in mind, she emerged. Khaki shorts, bony knees. In those days she was too ardent for the desert. _

What was this? The spine of the book told her: The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje. She'd read this book before, for a graduate class. It wasn't really anything like the film version everyone had been so wild over. The main characters in the novel, the Canadian nurse and the Sikh, were relegated to being background characters to the hot 'n heavy romance of the married Katharine and the Hungarian cartographer Almaśy, whose status as… a spy… had not been brought through.

It was a novel about pacifism, she'd decided, about how loyalty to one country or another wrecked everything between the pairs of lovers. Actually… what was that quote?

_All that I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps. _

They were nearing that, she mulled. Gone were the days of the Cold War, the easy schism between East and West, red and blue, black and white. That was her father's world, the world her mother came from. Her generation had it different. There was the questionable war in Iraq, the hunt for the multi-national Al Qaeda, all the terrorist splinter groups that had formed from the remnants of the USSR. Eastern Europe was crawling with ex-KGB specialists who'd gone freelance. Even the CIA was rife with doubles, she was sure of it- like Haladki, that snarky little bastard who'd been terrified of her involvement in the Rambaldi prophecy.

Freelancer. That had been her CIA code name while she'd been working at SD-6 as a double agent for the CIA.

Sark had no country, either. He was loyal to no one, except for himself. His first language hadn't been English; it was Russian, though he did a good job of concealing whatever latent accent he might have had. So his mother had been Lazarey's mistress. He was, in the truest sense of the word, a bastard.

So where was the bastard now, she thought. He planned to send Vaughn her rings if she didn't cooperate? What was his plan?

She replaced the book on the table and went to the window. She was higher up that she expected, maybe an attic room, and on the opposite side of the house than she'd snuck up on. It wasn't that high- the house was only three stories, but she didn't have any of the gear she'd need to just… jump. She was good, but she wasn't able to sprout wings.

There was a light rapping on her door. "Sydney?" Sark's muffled voice came through the wood. "Have you rejoined me from the realm of Morpheus?"

She stalked to the door and tried the knob, but it wouldn't turn. She heard him put the key in the deadbolt on the outside of the door, and the door swung inwards, scraping the skin on the top of her big toe.

"Oww!" she howled and jumped back.

He looked mildly down at her foot, as if it were perhaps a mouse that had invaded his house instead of her bleeding, stinging foot. "I didn't realize you'd be standing so eagerly by the door."

At that she leapt at him, but he saw her coming and jabbed her with the heel of his hand in her solar plexus, knocking her backwards onto the floor. The door slammed behind him and he grabbed her shoulders as she struggled up, his fingertips digging into the back of her shoulders, and threw her backwards onto the bed.

The sensation of falling aroused her a little, it always had. But no time for that. Before she could even bounce, he was on her, straddling her torso and pinning her arms uselessly at her sides.

"Sark!" she spit, "Get off me!"

"Hah," he gave a short laugh, his face so close to hers that she could smell his toothpaste, "I thought you liked it rough! Or is that only when you're dishing it out?"

"None of your business!" She could feel the heat rising in her cheeks at the thought that he had seen the tape from the VCR. _One Night in Sydney_.

"Your reputation precedes you, my dear," he tsked with the tip of his tongue. "Word does get around. Rumor has it Mr. Simon Walker was lucky enough to sample your wares a time or ten."

Walker. That asshole she'd worked with for the Covenant during The Lost Years. Her father had shot him later.

"I must admit," Sark whispered, his face almost within her biting range, "These reports have made me quite… curious."

She closed her eyes and breathed hard. "What do you want with me?"

"Sydney!" he laughed again, "I always told you, we're destined to work together, you and I. Even I'm not low enough to force you to be disloyal to your husband. I would hate to rock the proverbial boat, as it were."

With that he eased off of her, and left her lying on the bed.

"I need your help to find someone."

* * *

_So this was how it was going to be_, she thought. She stared up at him from the bed, not moving. She didn't want him to think he made her desperate to jump up. So this was how he was going to play it- the threat of rape? Of erotic violence? Too bad he'd chosen her specialty.

"Who are you looking for?"

"I knew you had some manners," he sighed, "I'm looking for a man-- someone I knew in my youth. I have a score to settle with him."

A revenge plot, huh? Lame, she told herself, lame and childish. Also lame that someone as young as Sark referred to his past as his "youth". He was still a youth.

The closed door was behind him and he leaned back, his hands on the knob. She noticed he was still breathing hard from the exertion of holding her down. The spot where he had punched her chest was beginning to throb- she would be bruised from his hand.

She sat up, slowly, so as not to give him reason to pounce on her again. Not that that would necessarily be bad. Maybe lead him on a bit. Let him think she was giving in to his rakish charm.

_His…. What_? Disloyal brain.

"I have reason to believe that the individual in question murdered my mother," he began. "He was a rival of mine here at boarding school. But also in the agent training protocol."

So… He had been subjected to training as a child too. They were… unsettlingly alike.

"Fine," she shook her head, and hoped she'd be back in LA soon.

* * *

They went downstairs to the study.

Sark's laptop, silver and barely an inch thick when closed, stood out like a sore thumb on the oversized wood desk. The house was old school: dark wood, leather, overtly masculine in a way that made Sydney wonder if perhaps Sark's sister was a lesbian.

He caught her staring at the device and shrugged, "It gets the job done."

"So, what is the job?" She was eager to know what she'd been sucked into.

"Like I said," he raised his eyebrow, "I need your help to find someone. Unless you had already forgotten."

She stared at him. "You didn't tell me who your mark is."

Sark opened the laptop and flicked it on. He settled back into the desk chair and after a few seconds of clicking and mousing, he said, "This man."

Sydney moved around behind the chair to see. Daniel Wells. "Ok?"

"Mr. Wells," Sark's politeness was arch, "has been working as a freelancer for various groups in the former USSR states for some time now. Not long ago, I was the gracious recipient of this photo-" he clicked something in the taskbar that opened a gruesome photo of a woman strangled, naked on a bed.

Sydney pressed her lips between her front teeth, ignoring the pain in the lower one. She needed to pay him back for her puffy lip, she noted mentally.

The dead woman was, or had been, gorgeous at one time. Long, auburn hair, a little curly- what Francie had jokingly called "porn star hair", a style Sydney's straight, thick mouse brown locks defied each time they'd attempted it- slender legs and waist despite her age, graceful arms that were now spread akimbo across the bed she'd been laid on.

She was not dissimilar, Sydney noticed, to her own mother. Passable as an American, but something about the woman's physique- perhaps the defiant refusal to slowly widen and soften with age the way many American women do- belied a hungrier, more desperate upbringing. A Cold War baby.

"So that's your mom?"

"At one time, yes." Sark's eyes betrayed nothing. Sydney couldn't tell if he was playing her or not.

Sark clicked the photo closed while she was still staring at it. "The title of the email in which it was delivered bore the subject, 'From Russia with Love'."

"But… why?" she asked. "Why send you the photo, why now, why your mother?"

"That," he said with a raised eyebrow, "Is what I need you for. The CIA has been tracking Daniel Wells for some time now. I want their files."

She rolled her eyes. "No."

"What, no?" he actually feigned surprise well, she observed. "You said you would help me."

"I don't have access to the files like that, Sark," she explained very logically. "Agents don't actually have that much access. The analysts have higher level of clearance that we do, and only pull the info we need for briefings and missions. It's all pretty standard security detail, I think you know that."

He sighed impatiently. "Yes, I suppose most mundane CIA agent might let this slow them down. You, however, are anything but mundane. You wouldn't let this stop you if it were Vaughn who needed your help."

She stared at him, her eyes cold. "Don't bring him into this."

"I do admire your skill," he placated her, "I've never lied about that. I can't believe they've beaten your spirit down into thinking that you're one of them, Sydney," he barely hid his disgust from her. "Please… don't be ridiculous. The Alliance trained their operatives at a much higher level than any agent that that pathetic excuse for a training camp of the CIA's has ever turned out."

His disdain for the Agency was palpable to her, and she wasn't sure if she wanted to slap him for his disrespect, or agree with him.

"'The Farm'?" he smirked. "That place would be like holiday camp compared to what you and I were up to as children."

She sighed.

"And let's not forget about our little discussion from last night." He dangled the threat again like a carrot in front of one of his precious horses.

"You are out of what passes for your goddamn mind," she finally relented. "Let's get down to business."


	7. Chapter 7

Several hours later they had spec'ed out transfer protocol for the information he needed. She supposed it was a small price to pay to get him out of her hair. And besides, Marshall could whip up some kind of tracker to imbed in the electronic files so that they could follow his movements from afar. Where she was safe from this insanity.

They moved into the den and sat on the couches, pouring over what little information Sark had pulled together on Wells.

He stood up to retrieve something from the bookcase, from a hollow book, when the idea struck her. He had just turned, and was standing in a shaft of late afternoon sunshine coming through a west window. She should beat him to the punch, take the threat out of his game before he could use it against her. Get close to him and get her rings back.

She rose to her feet, her knees a little weak. "Sark," she breathed, "Come here."

To her surprise, he obeyed without hesitation. He crossed the distance to her in two unhurried strides, so close that they were toe-to-toe. The air between them was electric; how should she approach him? She was pretty sure if he'd respond in kind if she slapped him. Better to catch him off guard…

She raised her hand and placed it on his stomach, just below where she guessed his belly button was. He was very warm through the thin layer of cloth- or was it the heat of her own palm? She could feel sticky wetness between her legs. _It's not cheating_, she told herself.

_Nothing is private_, her own words hissed back at her.

* * *

_What was this_, he wondered. This was not a side of Agent Bristow he'd seen. Aside from that biting kiss she'd administered at that club 3 years ago, she'd never laid a hand on him except to hurt him.

Her mouth had been hot on his around the cool pebbled skin of the lime, which she'd sucked out of his lips and clamped her teeth on his lower lip. It had surprised him, but in a good way. He dimly remembered, as the thumb on the hand she'd placed on his gut slipped under the waistband of his trousers, how he'd squeezed her ass as she'd bitten him.

God, that ass. That everything. She was taller than Lauren, harder than Allison. And they expected something from him that he couldn't find in himself—even Lauren, with her exhibitionist tendencies. A lover. Some kind of reliable tenderness in the swirling dark underworld they'd become part of.

That was not his strong suit.

Her thumb fell below the line of where his shirt was tucked in, and their skin met. The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end as her thumb traced a half-moon shape across his abs. He suspected she was playing with him, but he'd take it as long as he could.

* * *

His skin was softer than she'd expected. Someone this calculated didn't seem like they should have tender skin.

His breathing quickened when she moved the pad of her thumb back and forth across his abs, and against her better judgment, so did hers. Her throat closed when she thought of Sark, of fucking him. Was she playing right into his plan?

Finally he raised his hand and put in on her left shoulder, and drew her close to him. She didn't move her feet, but rather leaned her whole body into the space between them. She slid her whole hand under his shirt, then, and he leaned towards the muscle spanning between her neck and her shoulder. For an agonizing second, he paused so close she could feel his moist shallow breath on her skin, then she felt his sharp, even teeth squeezing her skin. Hard.

"Ah!" she yelped, but he didn't pull away. "Don't—"

_Don't, what? _

"You're going to leave marks," she half whispered, her voice leaving her somewhere midsentence. She knew it to a nanometer how rough she and Michael could be with each other without there being evidence for all to see, but this was… unpredictable. She glanced sideways and saw that he didn't have her necklace around his neck—where was it?

Surprised at her admonishment but unwilling to stop, he kept his mouth there and increased the pressure slightly. "Don't you want a souvenir?" he mumbled against her skin.

It was too far gone to stop now, she realized. She hadn't expected him to acquiesce so soon. And she was aching for someone, anyone, even Sark, to give her a good fuck.

She yanked back from his bite and backhanded him across the face.

He just laughed, rubbing his jaw with his hand, and smiled a slow, amused smile at her. "So it is true then, what they say."

"Shut up," she said, her voice surprisingly low and savage sounding, and she grabbed the sides of his face.

* * *

He _had_ been bluffing, his plan to send her rings home and make Vaughn suffer, wondering if she were pregnant by him or by Vaughn, but this was way better, he decided in an instant. Why not go for it? He didn't owe that smug SOB anything. Except perhaps payback for several broken noses and a broken shoulder.

He shoved her down on his bed upstairs, her nails scratching at the back of his neck as he pinned her down with his body. It'd been awhile for him. He was young, though. How much older was she than him? He'd heard that women got really randy in their 30's- biological clock and all that- but he didn't realize it would be so… fierce.

Something steely flashed in her eyes, more like behind her eyes, when he looked at her as he bent to kiss her. She reminded him in that instant of her mother. Irina had the same gaze when she needed you for something. And thinking of Irina at a time like this made him mildly embarrassed and not a little scared for his life.

She was so hot she felt like she was burning-- a horrid cliché, he realized, as it flashed through his mind-- but true. After the initial slap their violence was mostly contained to biting, though he did grab one of her wrists, circling it with his thumb and forefinger and stretching it out above their heads. Her wrists were that small.

Her remaining hand found its way to his fly and unzipped it anyway, as he used his free hand to unclasp her bra under her back. She had nice breasts; he'd seen them in the decontamination room in Paldisky, when he'd bargained Sloane's life in return for the antidote to cure Vaughn.

_Ah the tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive_. Shakespeare.

He knew had to release her arm eventually, so that he could pull off her jeans. First, though, he yanked up her shirt, exposing her stomach to his teeth. He trailed his mouth down, below her belly button to the waistband of her jeans, not so much kissing her stomach as nipping it; then in a rush he let her go, slipped the button from its hole and hooked his hands on the waistband at the sides of her hips. He pulled down her jeans and underwear--fairly boring black cotton bikinis, he noticed with a trace of disappointment--in one movement, and as he drew them from her ankles she sat up and pulled off her shirt.

Magnificent. She lay, propped up on one elbow, her knobby, scarred knees together, terribly demure for someone who was ripping her clothes off.

He was still clothed, a terrible hindrance in the face of what was about to occur. She sprang to her knees in front of where he stood at the edge of the bed, and yanked down his trousers.

He forced himself to unbutton his shirt- he liked this one too much to have it ripped- and to slow down as he felt her teeth and tongue on the tip of his sex. Dear god, this was like back at the academy, a clandestine visit from the girls at the boarding school up the way.

After he drew off his shirt he cupped his hand under her chin, forcing her gaze up at him even as she continued to give him what was, quite possibly, one of the most divinely sweet blow jobs he'd ever experienced.

* * *

She brought him to the brink with her mouth, until she could taste that little bit of pre-cum on the back of her tongue. Mostly though, she wanted him to think she was nuts for him.

Well, she was, but not specifically for him. Just a for hard, hot cock in general.

When she knew he was almost there, she pulled back. She wanted some satisfaction from him before he was worthless to her.

Before she could even look up at him, he was on her, pushing her onto her back. She didn't even try to resist- what point would there have been?—and besides, his sex was still slippery with her saliva. Just in case she wasn't very wet.

That was not, however, the case. He was in her in an instant, but then he lay quite still. She realized then that he was trying, desperately, not to just cum in her and leave her blue. How considerate.

"You're wet like a mango," he breathed against her neck. "So… slippery."

Mmmm, mango. It make her think of her honeymoon.

He and Vaughn, she decided, were about the same size, just… different. Their bodies felt different. His torso was slighter somehow, he was a bit taller, or… she wasn't sure. Slowly, so as not to move around too much under him, she drew her legs up around his waist and crossed her ankles over his back.

"Mmpf," he grimaced against her shoulder. "You might be the death of me."

"Just fuck me," she snapped, wanting the sweet release that he was teetering towards. It had been weeks since she'd come.

It seemed to snap him out of his reverie, and he propped himself up on one elbow to look at her.

* * *

He had no way of knowing what went on between her and Vaughn, but it didn't seem to be much of anything. _Either that, or she was a phenomenal nympho_, he thought.

He obeyed her demand, pulling back from where he'd shoved into her in a rush. She was still so hot, and so tight. He wondered if she was deliberately squeezing him or if she was just naturally this…

God, the very thought of it threatened his ability to maintain control.

He'd never been with a woman who was so… brutally forward, he realized. Most girls played it coy, even when they were desperate for a good fucking. Sydney had none of that coquettishness about her. He allowed his mind to wander to what she might've been like as a teenager. _She's 6 years older than me_, he remembered dimly reading her birth date in a file, _she would've been 16 when I was 10_.

That didn't make a bit of difference now, though, as they lay tangled together in the afternoon sun. Her legs were around his waist- she didn't even try to resist him- and her arms were around him now. Her teeth, tugging at the lob of his right ear as the nails of her right hand scratched his shoulder blade.

She drew a sharp breath, without letting go of his ear. "Sark," she breathed. She'd always called him by his last name. He wondered, a second or so before he couldn't resist any longer and he let himself come, whether she called her husband by his first or last name when they fucked.

It was a second after she'd whispered his name that he'd come in her, in a hard, wet rush- his body arched over her slightly and the muscles along his spine felt like steel cables under her fingertips. His final thrust was so hard it actually hurt a little, which pushed her over the edge.

She arched back, too, her shoulders almost up off the bed and squeezed her thighs close to his waist in delight. She spasmed around him, uncontrollable with ecstasy.

Her breathing was so ragged that she wasn't sure whether she would pass out or not for a minute. Sweet Jesus, he was a good lay. She knew she'd been desperate, but she usually didn't tremble like this afterwards. Her whole body felt like Jell-o.

The last thing she thought, before she closed her shaking eyelids, was of the song she'd listened to on the plane:

_Unwanted uninvited kin it creeps beneath your crawling skin it lives without it lives within you _

_Feel the fever comin' you're shakin' and twitchin' you can scratch all over but that won't stop you itchin'_

_Can you feel a little love? Can you feel a little love? Dream on, dream on. . . _

_Blame on your karmic curse or shame it on the universe it knows its lines it's well rehearsed_

_It sucked you in it dragged you down to where there is no hallowed ground where holiness is never found _

_Payin' debt to karma, your body for a living, what you take won't kill you but careful what you're giving_

* * *

Songs:

1 "Dream On." Exciter, Depeche Mode.


	8. Chapter 8

"Sark." Her voice snapped him out of his drowsy, silent mulling next to her. They lay apart, not touching, not cuddling. Neither of them had a need for that. "Where's your shower?"

"Down the hall," he turned his head to look at her.

She lay flat on her back, her fingers laced over her lower ribcage, her knees drawn up and her feet flat on the bed. He could see the tiny beads of sweat on her brow, and along her upper lip.

Without another word, she rolled off the bed, collected her clothes and disappeared down the hall. He lay still, hardly believing that he was lying in his sister's house, sweaty and sticky from screwing her.

He scrunched his eyes shut and a gleeful smile overcame him. He actually started laughing out loud a little, this slightly hysterical laugh that he got occasionally when something so ridiculous happened to him that _he_ couldn't even believe it, he who had seen enough ridiculous, unbelievable things in the last 12 years to last most people a lifetime.

_Count them_, he thought, _these things_. The entire Rambaldi mess. The idiocy of the CIA. The idiocy of some of his employers. The death of his own father at the hands of his double-agent lover who'd been married to his latest conquest's current husband. At his order.

Sometimes he didn't know whether he thought his life was a ridiculous soap opera, or some kind of cosmic joke.

The smile slowly left him and he lay wondering if he could pull this off.

He did need her help. He needed intel that he knew the CIA had. He needed her to go back. Dear God, had he risked it all with this one indiscretion? What if she wouldn't go back?

_Unsinn! Sei nicht so bescheuert! Don't be ridiculous_, he told himself. Of course she'd go running back to LA, back to her precious moral boring Vaughn. He didn't understand their dynamic, except that Sydney had obviously found a man she could push about at her whim. Vaughn was malleable, easy.

He hadn't been raised to be a spy.

_Yes_, Sark thought, this was the difference between Vaughn, and himself. And Sydney.

Spy work, he'd found, was nothing like regular people supposed it was. It was mostly boring, with occasional stretches of excruciating, mind-numbing nothingness. The times you had to make yourself invisible. People didn't really know what that was like—to disappear. Even when people thought they weren't leaving a trail, they did. It was much harder to leave a place without a trace- like you didn't exist.

He read to pass these stretches. Or rode if he could. But mostly read. In fact, he'd forgotten he'd left The English Patient in this bedroom the last time he'd holed up here. He picked up the book from the bedside table and tried to find where he'd left off.

Ah, yes: _The desert could not be claimed or owned—it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names long before Canterbury existed, long before battles and treaties quilted Europe and the East. Its caravans, those strange rambling feasts and cultures, nothing left behind, not an ember. All of us, even those with European homes and children in the distance, wished to remove the clothing of our countries._

He lay the book on his chest, open, and thought about it. They were all the same on the inside, so what did it matter what country they came from? How was it that people all over the world did the same things, day in and day out- laughed, married, fucked, died- and countries could still start wars and try to extinguish each other? He didn't understand.

He thought about the first time he'd tried to recruit her, at the technical library, in Moscow, she in her ridiculous military uniform get-up. He was in charge of the operations, after her mother had given herself over to the CIA. Even he hadn't known Irina's endgame, that she was deliberately giving Sydney intel that would make most of his operations useless. He wondered, briefly, about the value Irina had placed on his life, tasking him go on so many missions that she knew would go awry.

"_Whatever Arvin Sloane pays you, it can't be enough," he'd said, disengaging the thumb safety and pressing the gun to her temple. "Would you consider coming to work for me, if it meant I'd let you walk out of here?" _

_She'd turned her head slowly towards him, obviously unafraid that he'd shoot her. "I believe if you took the time to hear a comprehensive offer, you might say yes," he pressed on. He was calling the shots now in the organization. He had discretionary funds to bring on new operatives. _

"_You're cute," she sneered insincerely, "But I'll pass." _

_Then she'd yanked her skeleton key out of the access terminal and set off the alarm, which foolishly distracted him and allowed her to knock his gun away from him. They grappled for several seconds, but the gash on his knee from the hatchet she'd thrown into it several weeks before caused him to flinch. She rolled away from him, and the guards were on him. She'd run up the stairs and he'd been taken into custody. One mention of Irina's name had earned him his freedom. She still had friends in high places within the government__i_

"Put some pants on already," her voice cut into his daydream again.

He looked up and saw her standing in the doorway, her long dark hair still dripping wet, but combed into long, straight chunks. She had her clothes back on. What a shame.

"Oh," he said, languid, "I'd supposed you want me to keep them off, considering the vigor with which you'd removed them." He smiled.

She picked up his pants from the floor and threw them at him. "You supposed wrong."

* * *

She was all business. Their 15 minutes of sweaty, unapologetic animal sex had focused her back on the task.

_I would've been able to finish my briefs for that meeting_, she thought, a tad bitterly, _if I could've just done_ that_ weeks ago_.

"Sydney," his voice was soft behind the bathroom door, "How soon are you going back?"

She smoothed a few wisps of hair around the nape of her neck into the French braid she was plaiting her long, unruly hair into. "Don't worry, Sark, you'll get your intel soon enough."

"That's not why I ask," he said.

"Well, what then?"

"I think you might have a look at your stomach."

What?

She pulled her shirt from her jeans and looked at her abdomen in the full length mirror on the back of the door.

There were two tiny rows of jagged lines, between her belly button and…. Well, down there. She traced them lightly with her fingertips. Were those... _teeth marks_? They were an angry red but quickly tended towards purple in the deeper parts.

With an exasperated howl she threw open the door and yelled, "Why did you do that?"

He looked amused and shrugged innocently. "You didn't seem to mind at the time."

Must. Control. Blood. Pressure. She could feel the hot flush, the blood jump to her face before the feeling of faintness started to wash over her. Do. Not. Faint.

"Oh, Sydney, come off it," he cajoled her, "If you're half as rough with him as you just were with me, he'll think it's an old wound."

_Except there haven't been any fresh wounds in a month, you asshole. _

"This?" she pointed to her stomach, "Is unacceptable if our… partnership, if I can even call it that, is going to work."

As she turned away from him, she muttered under her breath, "_Amateur._"

He grabbed her from behind and yanked her close against his body. She was astonished by the strength in the skinny arm he had around the front of her chest. He leaned in to whisper next to her ear, a gesture dangerous in its calmness, "I think you will find, Agent Bristow, that I am anything but."

His confidence reminded her of her mother.

* * *

Back downstairs, he gave her the backpack she'd been carrying, her guns and the camera.

"Aren't you forgetting something?" she asked.

"Mmm, do you want a goodbye kiss?"

She didn't even blink as she held up her left hand and flipped him off with her ring finger.

"I believe it is you who is forgetting," he said smoothly, "our agreement. You help me, I give you back your rings."

"You must have an unconscious death wish."

"You must forgive me if I don't feel terribly… ill at ease." He was back to default boredom setting, she observed. "'You burn me, I burn you'--" his smile was nearly impossible to bear—"Wasn't that how it went?"

_Fucker._

_

* * *

_

As quickly as she could collect her things from the bed and breakfast and get the hell of England, she thought, the better.

She pedaled furiously up the road, away from him. Away from whatever craziness he was trying to suck her into with this game.

He was a _kid_-- God, what was she doing? Desperation made her stupid; it had been the case with Danny, with Vaughn when she'd found out he'd married another woman, and now…

_Maybe the problem isn't you, maybe it's them_, said a little voice in the back of her head. _They want something you can't give them._

She shoved it down, the urge to believe that human connections were useless, and pedaled harder.

* * *

Episodes:

i Dead Drop. Season 2, Episode 4. Written by Jesse Alexander.


	9. Chapter 9

"Syd!"

His voice reached her over the rumble of suitcase wheels, the click-clack of a business woman's heels and the floor polisher at LAX.

She rushed forward and melted into his arms. He smelled a little like gasoline and grass; had he been mowing?

She quickly slipped her left hand behind his back as they walked out into the dusty darkness of the short-term garage.

"Well?" he asked politely, "How'd things go?"

She shrugged, "Alright, I guess."

He looked at her hard, the corner of his mouth turning down slightly. "Alright? Did you get any intel?"

They climbed into the car, and she took care to cover her hands with her sleeves of the sweatshirt, like she was cold. It must've been 85.

"Just pictures." She forced herself to look at him. "Surveillance only, remember? No crazy stunts or cool Marshall gadgets."

"Yeah," he said like he didn't care, as he leaned forward and kissed her, but not without letting his lower teeth press hard against her bottom lip.

Mmm, that was kind of nice.

"Hi." She could feel herself melting, melting, melting like the Wicked Witch. He had missed her.

"Hi."

They drove home in the crawling Thursday afternoon traffic; had it really only been 5 days she'd been away? It seemed like forever. LA seemed like a different planet than the one she'd come from, so orange, dry, plastic. She dozed lightly in the passenger seat and woke when she felt him move his hand to her thigh, just under the edge of her skirt where it ended midway between her hip and knee.

"Hello there," she said without opening her eyes. "I think other people can see into our car."

"Yeah?" she could hear his smile. "Let 'em."

He kept his hand there the whole rest of the way home. As they'd turned onto their street, it was just dusk; she'd opened her eyes and found herself thick-lidded with desire for him to take her to their bed and fuck her slowly into oblivion. Weird, she didn't even feel like hitting him.

* * *

She lay still with her left elbow under her head, so still under him that if she hadn't periodically moved her hand where it rested on the small of his back, her fingers in the groove of his spine, he might've thought she'd gone to sleep.

For once, his tenderness didn't bother her.

She didn't really come, but she didn't feel cheated, either. By the time he'd finished, she was actually deep in thought about how to explain her missing rings, if it came to that. He hadn't noticed the purpling bruise on her chest.

They'd left the stereo on in the living room before they'd stumbled into bed, and through the haze of early sleep she thought she heard Bono singing,

_You bury your treasure_

_Where it can't be found_

_But your love is like a secret_

_That's been passed around_

_There is a silence that comes to a house_

_When no one can sleep _

_I guess it's the price of love _

_I know it's not cheap_

_Oh c'mon_

_Baby, baby baby, light my way__1_

_

* * *

_

"Julian Sark," her voice bounced off the walls of the conference room, "was tracked to this house on the outskirts of Cheltenham, in the region of western England commonly known as the Cotswolds. Our contact there provided us with initial intel on the house."

The pictures Nigel had given her spooled onto the monitors on a timed delay. Marshall always did something cool with the presentations.

"According to local sources, the deed to the house is papered to a Ms. Natashya Lorien. But… she doesn't live there. No one in the area knows how long the house has been empty, or been owned by Ms. Lorien."

A faint grimace crossed her father's face, but it was gone before she could look back.

"Moving on," she clicked the pointer with her fingertips, "It appears that Mr. Sark is there, but… we still don't know why."

Photos of Sark's afternoon ride spooled by without comment until one of the newbies said, "Is that horse drooling?"

"It's a chemical reaction," she explained tersely. "The metal of the mouthpiece on the bridle usually has some kind of copper in it, which causes salivation. It's considered a sign of acceptance by the horse of its rider's commands."

They all stared at her, and she could feel a blush rising in her cheeks. Damnit, why did she always have to be such a geek? Actually, she'd asked Sark because she had had the same question.

"Anyway, "she covered, "Aside from these few photos of him, I didn't get anything."

They all kept staring at her.

"He didn't leave the house once," she could feel the heat rising up again, "I laid out in the weeds for two days."

"Thank you, Sydney," Jack finally rose to her feet. "This is a good start. I think we should further explore the owner of the house- perhaps we can uncover a connection to Sark and the reason for his sudden reappearance."

* * *

"So, Sark is holed up in a house in England after being in hiding for three years, and he turns up to go riding?" Vaughn was at her side as they walked back to their desks. "You don't think that's a little strange?"

"Well, sure," she agreed, "But like I said, we have a lead to work on. I'm sure it's all part of some grander scheme—we just need to figure out what."

He nodded and ducked his head for a quick peck on her lips. "You're feeling OK, then?" Concern forced his forehead into several prominent wrinkles.

"Yeah." She looked at him and tried to look for all the world like she was really, truly fine. Not a sickly thing that had to be taken care of.

He blinked, and she blinked back, before they parted and sat at their desks.

Ten minutes later, her phone rang.

"Sydney," her father's voice was low and impenetrable. "Can you… meet me in my office?"

"Sure, Dad," she hung up the phone without a sound.

She sank into the leather chair in front of him, crossed her legs, and looked expectantly at him. He was still handsome in his dark wool suit, even after all these years. She wished, for the briefest instant, that maybe her parents hadn't been spies, that they had stayed together, Jack and Laura. Maybe they'd be retired by now, live in Arizona. Someplace close, but far enough that she and Vaughn could go visit them. But then, she wouldn't have met Vaughn, if her dad hadn't been her Spy Daddy, and her mom hadn't killed his Spy Daddy, and—

"Sydney," his voice cut into her daydream.

"You expect me to believe that you spent four days tracking Sark and the best you could turn up was some pictures of his vacation home?" Jack's steely glare made her feel like she was 10 again.

She shrugged, nonchalant. "Like I said, he didn't do anything. He went out to ride, and that was it. I didn't want to risk getting closer to the house without backup, in case I got captured."

"Then why didn't you call for backup? We could've had Dixon, or Vaughn, or whoever you wanted there within 8 hours."

She shrugged again and looked at her hands. Had he seen that she didn't have her rings on? She slipped her left hand under her thigh like she was cold.

Jack sighed and leaned back in his desk chair. "Sydney," his voice softened a little, like it always did when they reached an impasse like this. "I appreciate that the last few weeks have been… difficult. You may not be feeling 100, that's fine, and…" he hesitated, "It's none of my business, what you and Vaughn have planned for your lives."

"The name on the deed," he continued. "When Irina was still Laura, when you were a little girl, she would correspond with old friends. Friends from her youth, she told me."

Sydney's stomach always started to churn a little when he mentioned her mother's name.

"She periodically updated me on what this friend or that one was up to, like any wife would," he stared at some fixed point above Sydney's head. "She had a friend, someone she told me was married to a worker at State who'd been sent abroad, stationed at an embassy in Bucharest. That friend, a woman named Nicole, had a daughter while they were 'abroad.'"

She looked at him, and at the same time, they said, "Natashya."

He nodded. "Which brings me to my question—what if Ms. Lorien is really Irina's friend's daughter?"

She nodded like she was just beginning to thread the connection together herself. She wasn't terribly adept at fooling her dad, about anything.

"And if so," she played, "What is her connection to Sark?"

"Exactly," her father's precise consonants caused the hair on her neck under her collar to rise. "I have trouble believing that an op as competent as Nigel wouldn't be capable of putting her name together with Sark in some plausible fashion."

She couldn't meet his gaze. "He let us find him, Dad."

"Yes, I think we already knew that," Jack sounded slightly exasperated. "Sydney, is there more you're choosing not to share?"

"Dad," her voice trembled a little, "She's Sark's half-sister."

* * *

Songs:

1 "Ultraviolet (Light My Way)." Achtung, Baby, U2.


	10. Chapter 10

They sat in silence for an eternity. It was so quiet that Sydney could count the seconds marked off by the cheap government-issue wall clock hanging behind her father's desk.

"So…" his voice trailed off. "You spoke to him, then."

Her silence condemned her completely.

"And?"

And. _And_. A-N-D. Three little letters that can mean so much or so little, depending on how you say them.

"I agreed to help him get some intel," she thought her voice might give out. "He's looking for someone he thinks murdered his mother."

"Sydney!" Jack's voice was sharp, "Why would you agree to do something like that? The plot to deliver Sloane to Sark didn't teach you enough what happens when you conspire with someone like that?"

She could feel his rage get going. He always hit his stride when he found a chance to harp on her mother, no matter how many times Irina had helped them in the last few years.

"Sark was an operative of your mother's, you know that as well as I—" Jack fumed now, "—which means he knows how to be loyal only to himself, and cooperates only when it suits him."

"I certainly hope you're not planning on indulging your pact with Mr. Sark," Jack reined in his anger then. "He doesn't have anything over you, you can walk away."

"Maybe having him in our debt wouldn't be so useless," she offered, knowing how Jack kept a tight leash on his contacts and called in his ruthless favors when it suited him best.

"Sydney," his voice tipped dangerously towards anger again, "Why would you want that?"

"He has my wedding rings," she whispered, and despite her efforts, she felt the hot, scratchy tears that were teetering on the edge of her eyelids begin to stream out onto her cheekbones. "He's going to send them to Vaughn if I don't help him."

Jack glowered and understood the line of logic perfectly. Hell, it sounded like something he might do, someday. If there were need...

"Do you really think that would work? Vaughn knows you better than that."

"No, I know," she hiccupped a little, "But, Dad, we…" Her throat caught in a sob so that she couldn't pronounce the words without being interrupted by her own sob. No way could she tell him the worst- that she'd been willingly unfaithful with Sark. She forced herself to sigh, to draw a breath all the way in, past the stinging lump. "Everything's been so messed up since Chechnya," she wouldn't even refer to it as "the miscarriage", "He… I—"

"Sydney," he said calmly, and handed her a tissue. "Take a deep breath."

"Dad, I knew," she couldn't look at him, "And I didn't tell him. Because… because I wasn't sure I wanted to have it."

Jack sighed heavily, and she wasn't sure if he was disgusted or not.

The ticking of the wall clock sounded like gunshots, they were so quiet.

"I must admit," he finally said, "I was somewhat surprised to learn you were trying to start a family now, like this, what with you both being agents."

She nodded quickly and snuffled, "I know."

"Are you… still?" They were so awkward with these kinds of subjects. Their relationship, even now, was still mostly work-related. Their family was so fucked up it was more adept at discussing weapons-grade anthrax and terrorist plots to take over the world with a device invented by a 16th century freak philosopher than a subject like potential grandchildren.

"Kind of?" she said, embarrassed. "Well… he is—I mean, we are? But I really don't think it's… the time."

Spy Daddy was clearly as embarrassed as she was. Ever since that mission to Ibiza two years earlier, when they'd forgotten their comms were on and he'd heard them discussing how she was rough with him, on ops _and_ at home, he'd tried to make it his business to stay out of their business. But it confirmed what Simon Walker had told him about Syd-as-Julia-Thorne in her missing years with the Covenant. That little indiscretion had earned Mr. Walker a bullet to the forehead. It also indirectly confirmed that the tape from the bug in the VCR wasn't an isolated incident in his daughter's life. Which caused him to wonder idly if this was somehow evidence of a defect in his parenting.

"Alright," he shook off the thoughts of his daughter with Vaughn, "I think we need to proceed- carefully. We need to look into Sark and Natashya Lorien's past. You said Lorien is his half-sister?"

She nodded, stabbing at her eyes with the now-soggy Kleenex lump. "He told me she was Lazarey's daughter with his wife. Sark's mother was Lazarey's mistress."

"Well," Jack said thoughtfully, "If we can believe that, we need to find out more about who his mother was. Because he's looking for someone who murdered his mother?"

"Supposedly, someone named Daniel Wells," she was starting to refocus, "Someone he was in school with in England, and someone who was also subjected to childhood operative training."

They locked eyes over her last statement.

"So we were right all along," she continued, "He was subjected to Project Christmas-type conditioning as well."

"Interesting," Jack said sardonically. If he'd had any idea his work from the 1970's would've come to this…

"So," he summed up, "Irina knew Lazarey's wife. And subsequently, her daughter. Did she also know Sark's mother?"

"It kills me that we didn't already know this, Dad," she shook her head. "How little the CIA knows."

"Sydney," he began, "We've been through this—going above board is infinitely harder that using blackmail and threats to get achieve the goal in mind."

"Yeah," she muttered, "But sometimes it's tempting."

"In the meantime," he glossed over her disgust at the CIA's ineptitude, "We need to keep this quiet until we can figure out his endgame."

She rose to leave, to go back to her desk and put on the face of someone who hadn't just been crying in her Spy Daddy's office.

"Sydney," his voice stopped her just as she was turning the knob, "You might consider making sure you don't get pregnant again."

"Dad," her cheeks reddened, "It's taken care of."

He nodded. Of course she'd have thought of that. She was his.

* * *

That evening, she and Vaughn sat on the couch, watching the Raiders get pounded by the Cowboys.

"Oh," Vaughn said offhandedly, "There was a letter for you in the mail."

"A letter?" she said. Who had time to write her letters? Most of her friends were dead or in WPP. Will and Nadia weren't allowed to contact her anymore.

"It's on the counter," he said, "By the fruit bowl."

She eased off the couch and padded softly into the kitchen. The envelope was postmarked LA.

_What kind of joke is this, _she wondered

She slid the sandalwood letter opener they'd received as wedding gift from Shankar, one of the analysts, under the flap and slip the paper across the top fold.

She pulled out a note written on hotel stationary, from the Hotel Las Palmas. That was a pretty swanky place downtown.

_You're not the only one who spies on old friends, _it read. The script was small, precise, and the lettering somehow not American.

Sark. Here in LA? Why?

"Who's it from?" Vaughn's voice from the other room made her jump.

"Oh, it's just a note from someone I knew in grad school," she lied, "We used to study together."

"Huh," Vaughn had already moved on. "Do you want to watch the rest of the game? There's hockey on, too."

"Hockey's fine," she said. She placed the note in the sink and ran water over it. When the paper was sopping wet, she pushed it into the drain and turned on the garbage disposal.

Later, in the middle of the night, she lay awake turning over the note in her mind. So he'd followed her back to LA? She supposed it made sense; they could've easily sent someone to the house to assassinate him, now that they knew he was there.

He wasn't dumb, that much was certain.

She threw off the covers and went to the phone.

"Information," a woman's voice said, bored.

"Yes," she said quietly, "Can you give me the number for the Hotel Las Palmas in Los Angeles."

The automaton's voice said, "The number you have requested is 310-233-9975."

She scribbled the number on a pad of paper they kept near the phone and dialed it with her thumb.

"Hotel Las Palmas," the clerk yawned. She could hear a trace of Mexico in his speech.

"Hi," she began, and realized she didn't know what room he was in. _Shit_. "I'm… I'm trying to reach an old friend?"

"Oh, sure lady," he obviously knew what she meant. "Hold on while I connect you."

She held her breath as the line rang once… twice… three times… four times….

"Yes." Finally he picked up.

"Sark," she whispered furiously, "What are you doing?"

"Oh, Sydney, it's you," he yawned. "It's rather rude to phone someone after midnight- I thought you knew that."

Bastard.

"Why did you follow me here?"

"You know what they say—out of sight, out of mind," his voice was low, a little hoarse. "I wouldn't want you to forget about me."

"Like I could afford to do that," she spit. "Leave me alone."

"I don't know what you can or can't afford," he said, a trace of amusement coloring his voice, "But I was sleeping peacefully, so I'm going to let you go now."

_Click. _

He'd hung up on her? Fuck him.

* * *

Lying on his back in the dark, Sark chuckled. This was going to be fun.

* * *

She returned to bed, where Vaughn was still soundly sleeping.

"Sometimes, I wake up before you, and I watch you sleep," he'd told her when he proposed.

_Stalker_, she thought now as she tried to rest.


	11. Chapter 11

The following day she began her hunt for Sark's mother. The woman in the photo he'd shown her was a redhead, maybe 55, tops. How could she find her identity? If she had been a prostitute, she probably didn't work under her real name.

His birth certificate—nearly everyone had one.

Wait. If his parents' relationship had been secret, would she have given birth to him at a hospital? It was worth looking.

She queried the database for all birth entries logged on March 15, in 1978, 1977, and 1979 for good measure.

Damn, there were a lot of people born on the same day, she thought.

Ok, apply filters: gender, continent.

It was down to 1,435 matches for males born in one of those years in European and Eurasian medical facilities.

Would Lazarey have allowed his name to go on a birth certificate? Especially one belonging to the son of his lover?

It was worth looking. She had worked to protect Lazarey during her time as Julia Thorne—that was the reason behind her faux "murder" of Lazarey, so he could go into hiding from the Covenant, who were desperate to get at Lazarey. But why?

Sonuvabitch.

There was a match.

Sark's birth certificate. Could it really be this easy?

Father: Andrian Alexsandr Lazarey. Mother: Anastasia Marta Szarkochev.

Weight: 3.18 kg, Length: 48 cm. So, he'd been small, about 7 pounds.

_Holy shit_, she realized, _Sark had parents_. It was so... weird.

It made her uncomfortable to think about him like that. She never thought of Sloane as being someone's son. And if anyone had been a mother to Sark, it was her own mother. Even weirder.

"_I've waited almost thirty years for this," her mother had said, in Taipei. "You must've known this day would come. I could've prevented all this, of course," Irina had given the tiniest shrug, "You were so small when you were born." _

_Sydney just stared at the gun in her mother's hand, at her side. _

"_It would've been so easy," Irina said, "Tell me, Sydney." She said her name almost sarcastically, "Who sent you here?" _

_She forced herself to look up, meet Irina's eyes. _

"_You must tell me," her mother insisted. _

"_Or what?" Sydney started speaking before even thinking of what she was going to say, "I'm grounded?__i__" _

She got up and went to her father's office.

"Sydney," he looked up from his pile of papers. "How are you?"

"I found out who Sark's mother is," she said breathlessly. "A woman named Anastasia Szarkochev."

"Good work," Jack nodded proudly. This was so much less uncomfortable than their conversation from the previous day. "We need to find out about her… I wonder if Irina will still respond to our contact protocol."

* * *

He was having a good bit of fun, surveilling her like this.

Her midnight phone call proved to him that she was still rattled by their encounter in England.

Good. Keep her on her toes, keep her loyal while he needed her. After that, Vaughn could have her back. And if they happened to repeat their tryst along the way a few more times, so much the better for him.

He followed her everywhere.

Of course he'd checked out their house before. It was a white stucco with a red tile roof, probably a 1950's construction from the post-WWII bungalow building craze in LA. A solid, modest house with a small yard and a flowering tree that hung over the driveway. Nothing that would belie anyone living there to be anyone but Mr. and Mrs. American Everycouple.

She had a steel grey Mercury Cougar, a car GM had since discontinued. Two doors, a little sporty, but nothing outrageous. Nothing that screamed Deadly Girl Agent.

He had been spot-on about the cars; he suspected the agency didn't bankroll its agents terribly well, a pitiful mistake in his not-so-humble opinion. The CIA spent its money on higher ups, and on highly skilled desk analysts who were extremely unlikely to get the shit shot out of them their first time out in the field.

He'd read that the mortality rate for 1st year field agents was astonishingly high, somewhere around 60? Pathetic, he thought as he saw her walk out of the CIA building towards the parking garage, so close he could hear the heels of her Manolo Blahnik slingbacks clicking on the sidewalk. She was so much better than this bunch of losers they were recruiting these days.

Like the particular gentleman who was due to meet him in 5 minutes.

And seeing her lean, strong legs made him sigh impatiently, wondering if he could get her to come to his hotel.

* * *

On schedule, a car pulled into the parking space next to him in the ABC Kwikie-mart lot and honked once, as if by accident.

He opened his door and swung out, a fluid movement, like a jungle cat slipping from its perch on a low-hanging branch to drop onto an unsuspecting victim below.

Before he opened the backdoor to get in, he smoothed his suit jacket over his shoulder holster. He was working. He wasn't nuts about how the holster felt over his dress shirt, but it was a necessary evil, he supposed.

"Don't turn around," he instructed the driver. "You're going to drive me over to the public garage on 4th and Vine."

"Ok," Closet Homo Newbie agreed. He really, truly didn't want Mr. Sark to shoot him in the back of the skull. It would mean a closed-casket funeral, and he'd always kind of imagined himself lying in state for all the world to admire. Not that he thought about his funeral a lot- but there were idle times at the Farm when he debated whether he'd want to be in a charcoal grey suit or his navy pinstripe.

They drove cautiously to the appointed garage, and pulled into a spot in the back, next to a structural column. It was out of view of the security camera that periodically recorded the area.

"Mr. Franklin," Sark began, "You've done a good job so far. Your intel on Agent Bristow has proven useful." Sark specifically meant the brief from the Chechnya mission, but using this fool to mess with Sydney from inside the Agency was entertaining, too.

"Thanks," Franklin said nervously. This business made him nervous. Like that stunt with the fake porn box? He didn't really care what Agents Bristow and Vaughn were up to, but it had apparently really rattled her. Now, that Agent Vaughn… he was a tall drink of water.

"Have you got time for another job?" Sark asked, knowing the answer.

"Sure," Franklin agreed. They really weren't too busy, the newbies. Mostly they had to tag along on boring, routine missions, like surveilling people who had previously been held under the Patriot Act, foreign nationals inside the US who were suspected of having terrorist ties. The whole world had gone terrorist-crazy, post-9/11. It sucked, frankly. They didn't get to use cool gadgets, like the ones that dork Marshall invented. They didn't get to travel to foreign countries. And they certainly didn't get to shoot at anyone.

"I want you to keep tabs on Agent Vaughn," Sark said, trying to keep the smirk from his voice. "I need to know what he does when Agent Bristow is absent."

Franklin nodded, nervous. If there was anything he'd learned, it was that that whole family was one big clusterfuck. For starters, there was her dad. Jack ruled his group of operatives with an iron fist—there was no double-crossing him. Her mother had been a KGB agent, one who had murdered her husband's father, and had faked her own death to take off back to Mother Russia.

"Ok," he finally verbalized. "I need at least…" he stopped momentarily, trying to decide how much he wanted for this job. This was decidedly more risky than making a fake porno. "At least 10 grand." It seemed like a lot of money, it was more than he'd make in 4 months. Thirty-two grand a year really didn't go very far.

Sark stared at Franklin in the rearview mirror, trying to hide his disgust. How old was this man? 23? Sark felt infinitely, high-handedly older than Franklin. They were only 4 years apart, but in the time it had taken Franklin to muddle through a program in Criminal Justice at Georgetown, get recruited into the Agency, and undergo basic training at the Farm, Sark had lived though enough covert activity to last most people several lifetimes. Ten grand? What was that? Pocket change. He had horses that were worth 12 times that.

"Done," Sark sighed, as if it pained him to part with that much money. "It'll be wired to your account in the morning."

Franklin smiled. They'd made a good deal.

* * *

She continued pouring through the files on Sark, his mother, and Lazarey's wife. She was astonished that Lazarey, a diplomat and loyal party member, would've allowed a birth certificate for an illegitimate child to be printed.

His mother, his mother, his mother… who was she? Anastasia Marta Szarkochev. At least they knew where he got his main alias from.

Could she have been an agent too, she wondered idly. Like her own mother, sent to seduce a man to steal something from him?

Wait, wait.

Her mother had known Lazarey's wife. They kept in touch. Why? Her father had thought Lazarey's wife was a childhood friend of Irina's.

When her mother had been in CIA custody, she'd told Sydney, "It was an honor, to be chosen- for a woman to serve her state. It meant… freedom."

Irina had been sent to marry a man she didn't love, to betray him, and steal his secrets. Had Lazarey's wife been tasked to follow the same path? Maybe that was why they kept in touch; they really were friends, and could at least keep each other company through the guise of letters to an old friend.

_You're not the only one who spies on old friends. _

But then why the mistress? Her mother had been quite capable of keeping Jack's attention.

Did the KGB need something from Lazarey? They had sent a mistress to him to leverage him, force him to have secret?

A secret son. By a secret lover.

It was perfect for someone who was attempting to rise to power, someone from a satellite state in the USSR, a petty diplomat who was unlikely, because of ethnic politics in the upper echelons of the Party, to ever amount to much.

So what was it that they needed from him that they'd tasked two capable agents to him?

_Shit_, she sighed, she needed to talk to Sark.

* * *

Episodes: 

i The Enemy Walks In. Season 2, Episode 1. Written by J.J. Abrams.


	12. Chapter 12

Well after Vaughn was sleeping, she crept again to the phone and dialed the Las Palmas again.

Following the same protocol as the night before, she waited for him to answer the phone.

"Good evening, Sydney," he answered before she could speak.

"Listen," she whispered, ignoring his stupid assumption that it would be her calling, "I need to meet with you."

"Ahh, they always come back," he teased, egging her on. "You're quite persistent to call me two nights in a row."

"Don't flatter yourself," she sighed. "There's a park down the street from me, next to a school. Meet me there in 45 minutes, or I let the CIA know where you're staying."

Click. She beat him to hanging up this time. So there.

* * *

LA was cold after dark, year round. She'd slipped on her running shoes without socks, her suede jacket over her nightshirt, no bra. Momentarily she thought about Sark's hand on her breast, free of its tether, and then shook it out of her mind. Business. You're working.

She jogged off down the street. She liked to run, she had always been a runner. It was one of her few hobbies that actually did her some good on the job. And she hadn't been running much, since the… Chechnya. It felt good, the strain in her thighs as she thumped down the hill around the block towards the playground.

She stopped jogging when she saw him sitting in his rental, a green Chevy Malibu. It was such a sub-par ride for him, she mentally noted, not like his usual expensive tastes.

He saw her and flashed the lights, once, twice.

_Yes, I see you_, she thought with irritation. And now so does the rest of the neighborhood.

She walked, catching her breath, in an unhurried fashion, to the passenger side of the car. He hit the automatic lock and she slipped into the passenger seat beside him.

The radio was playing, a Norah Jones song. She thought Ms. Jones was getting a bit overexposed, but whatever.

_Underground I'm waiting, just below the crowded avenue_

_Watching red lights fading out of view_

_Oh the air feels heavy_

_Everything just passes by and I think that I'm a little shy_

_Meet me outside, above ground_

_I'll see you on your way_

_I'll be with you someday- someday__1_

She ignored the obvious irony of the song, and looked at him. He was the most casual she'd ever seen, in dark blue jeans, those Adidas soccer shoes, and a dark blue sweater that zipped up the front. She could see a t-shirt under the sweater, hanging out around his waist.

"Well?" he was all business despite his attire.

"I need to talk to you about your mother," she began. "I can't piece together Daniel Wells's whereabouts without having more context about her, why he might want anything from her, or from you."

His eyes were steady as he looked at her and said, "I don't know anything about my mother."

She rolled her eyes. "How about you stop wasting my time."

"When have I ever wasted your time, Sydney," he looked amused. "Surely not recently." Her ears burned as she thought of them, together.

She couldn't meet his eyes; she tried not to think about how close they were. Closer than she and Vaughn slept to each other. It was always strange to actually be near enough to someone else to touch them. When she considered it, she had gone through her life with relatively little physical contact. Her dad hadn't been a sensitive type; her one grandmother lived clear across the country, mother gone.

"I think you know more than you're telling me. At least, about why your mother was with Lazarey in the first place," she explained, still not looking at him. "What would a man like Lazarey have to lose that someone might want from him? He didn't have power. He was never going to have power."

"If my father couldn't remain loyal to his wife," Sark smirked, "I don't know what a second woman could give him that the first couldn't. Too bad we killed him before I could have a little heart-to-heart with dear old Daddy."

"You tortured your own father," she accused him, "Before trading him to us, and then you had Lauren shoot him anyway."

"I tortured a man who laid with a woman," he said, his voice low, "Who happened to get pregnant, and give birth to me, yes." He stopped, and looked straight ahead at the swings moving in the gentle breeze. "If I were you, Sydney, I wouldn't confuse Lazarey with a father. Birth parents are not the same as real parents. Such as your mother, for example."

_Ouch_.

"What if it weren't a coincidence," she asserted, ignoring his cruel implication about Irina. "What if she had been sent specifically to Lazarey."

* * *

She was good, so good. He could barely keep from smiling. She thought like her mother. He knew most of this already. Irina had filled him in on most of the details. Just not the little part about his inheritance.

"What are you saying," he played along. "That my mother was a spy as well?" He already knew Irina had known both his mother and Lazarey's wife. They had been comrades at the training agency for female KGB agents in Moscow as teenagers.

"Think about it," she was trying to convince him. He loved listening to her, quite honestly. When she thought she was figuring something out. Like when they'd bargained in Paldisky, how he wanted Sloane, and she wanted to get the antidote she'd risked her life for, to save Vaughn from the virus that was killing him back home in LA.

_No_, he'd said. _Sloane first. Then you'll get back your precious antidote. __i_

She had grimaced, like it was the hardest decision in the world.

She'd nodded then, desperate for him to turn off the sprinkler system in the decontamination room, and she had looked devastated. When she realized she was willing to kill for Vaughn. It certainly helped that she thought it was Sloane who had ordered the execution of her fiancée. But it also played right into Irina's plan of getting Sloane out of the Alliance so that they could take the Rambaldi artifacts for themselves and bring down the Alliance.

"What if the KGB needed leverage on Lazarey for something, so they sent your mother to seduce Lazarey and possibly get pregnant, so that they'd have him in their debt?"

"Mmm," he said, "But what could a petty diplomat like my…" he deliberately hesitated to use the word 'father', "Like my father have had, that the KGB would so desperately want."

He knew, of course, perfectly well. Lazarey _was_ a petty diplomat- that was true. He was a party member, an apparatchik, but he was also of Romanov descent.

"That's what I'm asking you," she said, triumphantly. He could smell her perfume- what was that? Something light, a little floral. Awfully coy for someone who could fight hand-to-hand better than most men, he mused.

"When the CIA released me from its custody," he said, not a little bitter about that day when the NSC had butted in on the trade they were going to make with the Covenant and he'd nearly been killed, "And handed me over to the Covenant, they wanted me for one thing- my money."

He looked at her. She narrowed her eyes.

"I bargained my life for my inheritance." He wasn't lying. He'd signed over the eight hundred million dollars of Romanov money that he was due, to the Covenant. His funds had gone to finance their operation to assemble and use the Rambaldi device.

"What?" she sounded dubious. "What inheritance, I don't understand."

He looked at her. Her hair was in a loose ponytail, but she had the same kind of hair as Irina. It was long, thick, straight. It smelled good, too, he thought, and then pushed the thought of how he'd come to know that out of his mind. Business.

"My little portion of the Romanov family fortune," he said wryly. "The inheritance is patrilineal."

* * *

Of course, it made perfect sense, she realized. Natashya's mother had failed to have a boy. Send second agent, a mistress, to supply the much-needed heir to bleed the Romanov money from its owners and use it for the government's own devices.

Except that the government hadn't lasted long enough to see the plan through.

"Anastasia was a plant," she breathed. "She was sent to seduce Lazarey and have a son who could inherit his fortune."

"Very good," he said. "I knew you were bright enough to put it together."

"Spare me your bullshit," she snapped. She was starting to get cold, even inside the car. Her skin was slightly sweaty from running. "Now we need to find out what happened to your mother after you went off to boarding school."

"If I can't praise you for a job well done, Sydney," he grabbed her hand then, and forced her open palm to his lips. "Then let me at least tell you how sexy you are when you're working."

She stared, frozen with surprise as he kissed the center of her palm without looking away from her eyes. She wasn't even able to move her thumb from where it rested on his cheekbone, not even when she willed it as she felt his teeth scrape her life line, to gouge him in the eye.

It was so blatant, so… predatory. Like a cat staring at its prey before it pounced. She wanted to move, to hit him, scratch his cheek, but she just… couldn't.

"Stop it," she whispered. "Let go of me."

He huffed and dropped her hand as quickly as he'd grabbed it. "You should be getting back to your husband, I suppose." Bored Sark. "Just don't forget about our agreement," he threw in as she opened the car door.

"Fuck you," she said as she slammed the door.

* * *

"Unfortunately not tonight," he said out loud as he watched her stalk away. Nice one, he prided himself. Keep her off balance. Keep her thinking about him.

It could've been nice, though. Here. In his car.

Oh, well.

He waited until she was out of sight before starting the car.

* * *

Back at their house, she'd slipped into the shower. She looked at her palm, where he'd put his mouth on her. The water poured over her, scalding hot. It felt like her hand had been branded. She had freakishly large hands, she thought, as she took the nail brush and scrubbed at her palm until it felt like her skin was going to separate.

She sucked in her non-existent belly and looked at the marks on her stomach. God, like he owned her, she thought in disgust. To leave a mark like that. He obviously had no respect for whatever it was that they had, this… Partnership? You didn't deliberately put your partner in danger. Ever.

She had grudgingly come to terms with her own behavior where her partners were concerned; she told herself that she'd kept Dixon in the dark to protect him as well as herself, when she'd been working as a double inside SD-6. It had cost him his wife's life, before he'd learned the truth.

Even she and Vaughn had had their rough patches, particularly when they were first working together. In retrospect, she had been more than a handful, ordering him around, jumping 5 steps ahead of where the CIA was guiding her, but they'd evened out. Obviously. Still, he'd occasionally pressured her into things that she hadn't been completely comfortable with, like using Emily's illness to get intel. That had really bothered her. She massaged the bruise on her scalp absently, under a glob of shampoo lather.

"_Your father's been reporting Sloane's spending a lot of time at home…" Vaughn abruptly switched subjects from the Rambaldi manuscript. It was damp in the storage unit, the fluorescent light casting a greenish tinge on them both. _

"_Yeah," she conceded, "His wife, Emily—she's sick."_

"_You two used to be close, right?" _

"_We still are," she had corrected him, assuming he was trying to show that he had a personal stake in his role as her handler, "Less so since she was diagnosed—she's been a little reclusive. Actually… I haven't seen her since before I learned the truth about her husband."_

"_I think this is a real opportunity," Vaughn interrupted her thoughts about Emily, "We'd like you to call Emily, tell her you'd like to see her again, and get invited to their house." _

"_You want me to plant a bug," her forehead had crinkled in disbelief, "Vaughn, she's dying of cancer." _

"_Yes, I know—"_

"_So you're asking me to use this woman," Sydney wouldn't let him do this. Not Emily. _

"_She will never know," Vaughn's voice got hard, the way it always did when she questioned his authority. _

"_But _I_ will!" she exclaimed._

"_Look, we've been trying to plant a bug in SD-6, it's pointless—that office uses every possible counter surveillance technique, Sloane's house might be more vulner--"_

_"This isn't a logistical question, it's a moral one—"  
_

"_A moral one? Sydney, you're a spy, this is hardly the darkest decision you've had to make!"_

_They were talking over each other, the way they did when they disagreed, their sentences overlapping, one of them not letting the other get a full phrase out before interrupting to interject without even hearing the other out. _

"_But what _you're_ not hearing is," she came around to her objection, "Emily is my friend, despite her husband, _she is my friend_, who is dying—does this not seem at all wrong to you?" _

"_Why does this seem wrong to you?" Vaughn clearly didn't share her hang-up about using her connection to Emily to bug Sloane's house. _

"_Because! She is innocent, she is a good person!"  
_

"_Well, then what she doesn't know, what she will never know, is that this is one of the last opportunities she has to do something good," he concluded, superior that he'd won the argument._

_She'd pursed her lips, looked away like he'd convinced her, even as she'd steeled herself that she would not ever use Emily's innocence. Not even as a means to bring down SD-6 and the Alliance.__ ii_

Of course she'd given in later. She always did, when he asked her to do something.

She stayed in the shower for a good 15 minutes. She'd used the guest bathroom, so as not to wake Vaughn. That was all she needed right now.

* * *

Songs: 

1 "Above Ground." Feels Like Home, Norah Jones.

* * *

Episodes: 

i The Counteragent. Season 2, Episode 7. Written by John Eisendrath.

ii Page 47. Season 1, Episode 15. Written by J.J. Abrams & Jeff Pinkner.


	13. Chapter 13

The next day at the office, her father called her into his office. Again.

"Sydney," he rose from his chair, formal, when she'd slipped in the door. "I've been able to contact your mother."

"Dad," she said, "I may have figured it out without needing her."

"Oh?" he was a touch surprised, probably that she hadn't shared her intel with him sooner.

"Lazarey's mistress—Sark's mother—she was an agent, too," she said, the words coming out in a rush. "They needed to get leverage over Lazarey for something, so they sent Szarkochev to seduce him."

"And she got pregnant," Jack concluded, "Hence Sark." His lips quirked a rare Spy Daddy smile. "You would think, during all that KGB training, they might've taught their female operatives a bit more about birth control."

She didn't smile. The vibe about the circumstances surrounding her own birth still made her uncomfortable.

"Sorry," he apologized, "I take it you don't think Sark's conception was entirely accidental."

"Right."

"So why?" Jack was on top of it.

She paused. She couldn't tell him about the inheritance being stolen without revealing how she'd gotten her intel. She couldn't risk Sark delivering on his threat to reveal her infidelity.

"That's why we need Mom," she finished.

"Good." Jack smiled again, which was the most consecutive smiling she'd seen him do since… ever.

* * *

Sark hadn't seen Irina in 5 years.

Not since she'd abandoned him to the winds of fate, into CIA custody. Before Sydney had disappeared to the Covenant. He had spent two years in solitary, his only visits from the agents who came to ask him questions that he didn't know answers to.

_Where is Irina Derevko?_

_Where is Arvin Sloane? _

_Where are the Rambaldi artifacts? _

It was a particularly cruel fate, especially coming from someone he had always tacitly trusted. That word had never actually passed between them, Irina and Sark, but it was implicit.

She had been the one to come get him, when he was in school. He was 15, an upstart, intellectually superior to nearly all of his classmates, particularly in languages, writing, and mathematics. By then he was well fluent in English, despite the slow start with learning an entirely different alphabet, and had picked up a decent amount of German, Dutch, some of the Scandinavian tongues, and was thinking of going to university in Germany- they had a strong background in Oriental studies. The far east fascinated him, not just the martial arts, but their philosophies. Buddhism, meditation. The search for peace and enlightenment in one's self.

He was restless, a dreamer. He was tired of the other boys, most of them heirs to various family fortunes in England. He thought of them that way, too— as boys. He had always somehow been older than them; maybe it was being sent away from his parents when he was 5, a relief anyway, since his father had been only intermittently there, and when he was, he remembered mostly his cruelty to his mother. Which occasionally spilled over to him.

It was a shock to receive the picture of his mother from Wells; Irina had told him his mother had died. That, as the picture had proved, was obviously not the case.

He'd placed an ad in the Sunday Times, their old protocol for setting up a meet. He doubted she'd answer him. He had the distinct feeling she'd used him in whatever plot she'd schemed up, and then left him for dead.

_Russian cutie seeks XXX fun w/ fellow landsman._

But she'd answered the call. Placed an ad of her own in response to his.

_Molotov cocktail ready 2 explode 4 Russkie QT._

So he'd gone, against his better judgment, to Regent's Park in London, to the bench where they'd met so many times to set up jobs. He listened to his iPod as he waited. He listened to music from all over the world, all different languages. Mostly it was to train his ear for accents. Like this song. Rap, by Groove Armada. The fellow singing was English, but he had a different accent altogether than Sark's- more urban, more Cockney.

_They want rap- Ok, we'll give them rap on a platter- it don't matter- it could be I was white or black-a- the fact of the matter- I drop some 'ip 'op- and progressed a message…_

The double t's, they were dropped, a glottal stop connecting the vowels in platter, matter. No h's in hip-hop. He wondered how anyone could speak so ineloquently.

_London town- runs you down- I got sound- that's why I be comin' back to rebound… _

He liked London. The general grayness of it, punctuated by the bright green squares of parks and gardens. At any moment you could come around a corner and find yourself outside a tiny postage stamp of perfectly manicured grass, surrounded by a wrought-iron fence.

_Pulled around tugged and shoved as people we could expose those as rogue and evil to the sound of siren or the mayday, they say, come follow me, but to be frank I did it my way__1_

He'd waited, and waited, past the appointed time— 4:47 sharp—Irina was nearly always a little late.

"Julian." Her husky voice cut into his memories from behind him. Her voice was alto, like the sweetest choirgirl he'd ever heard, the kind that snuck out of practice in the church to drink a scotch and have a smoke at the corner pub with a man who was much too old for her.

"Irina." He didn't turn around, but he did press Pause on the iPod. It seemed very quiet in the park.

She slipped beside him then, and looked down at him from what seemed like a great height. She was tall, as tall as Sydney, but wore heels most of the time. She still looked fabulous. He didn't understand how someone as old as she could look better than most women in their 20's. He wondered momentarily if Sydney would be this good looking when she was in her 50's.

He almost felt like crying a little. He stood up, nearly nose-to-nose with her, and she leaned forward and pressed her lips to each cheek in greeting.

He didn't return the gesture, but instead watched her impassively as she looked him over proudly. She shook her mane of hair back off her shoulders and said, in Russian, "Should we go have a drink?"

He shrugged. He wasn't buying this old-friends-meeting-up-for-a-drink crap.

"Julian," she said, her voice low, still in Russian, "I know you're hurt- you need to give me a chance to explain."

"It's going to take a lot more than a drink to excuse your behavior," he said tersely, feeling his tongue roll around the Slavic consonants. It had been a long time since he'd spoken Russian with anyone. It was a more beautiful language than English, in his opinion.

He was trying not to be sullen, but seeing her again was making it difficult. She was the most mother he'd ever had. What little he could remember about his mother, she had been dramatic, flighty. If that had been her real persona at all. For all he knew, that was part of her alias. He wasn't even sure if Anastasia was her real name. Irina had been… firm, steady.

"Come on," she said, taking his arm in hers as if he hadn't even said that, "I know I owe you at least a few bottles of Chateau Petruse."

They strolled, arm-in-arm, across the length of the park. Despite his resolutions not to soften to her, he could feel his anger slipping away.

Finally, after the silence was killing him, he said in English, "So, how are you?"

* * *

Sitting across from each other in the bar, at a corner table with a wall at each of their backs, she'd smiled at him. Still he refused to give in and give her any leeway.

"I knew you'd come back to me, eventually," she said this certainly, as if there'd never been any doubt about their allegiance. "Even when you were working with the Covenant, trying to find Nadia, I knew you'd come back to me."

_Oh, for fuck's sake_, he thought. _You thought I was coming back after my employer stole my inheritance and sent me looking for your lost daughter, so they could use her for some evil device in the whole twisted Rambaldi mess? Spare me, Mommy Dearest. _

"Really."

"Yes."

They sat in silence, sipping the wine.

"What on earth would make you think that," he said at last. "You left me for dead and took off."

"You were always safe," she said, her eyes firm with belief. "Your being in custody kept you safe from the Covenant for two more years."

"Kept me safe?" he hissed. "They tortured me, do you realize that? They had plans to execute me at one point."

She waved her hand dismissively, "Jack made sure you stayed alive. He knew I had let you go willingly."

He rolled his eyes and took a big—no, giant—drink of his wine. These people were all crazy.

"Julian," she said, urgently. "How is Sydney?"

He was midswallow when Irina said her name. "What?" he coughed. Maybe he would meet his death today after all.

"Jack has contacted me," Irina divulged. "He needs intel on something that he and Sydney are working on. I figured…" she didn't look directly at him, "You might have been in contact with her."

"Yes." He agreed, but he wasn't willing to share all the details of their… "contact". And so Sydney had told her father about their agreement. Typical.

Irina nodded, her eyes still expectant. "They're beginning to put your life together. About your mother, and Lazarey. And your inheritance."

He stared sullenly at her. He felt like he was 15 again, the first day after she'd taken him out of the Academy to have him work for her. One day he had no relatives, then next he'd had an "aunt" from Russia.

"How is she," Irina's voice betrayed her a little- she missed Sydney, missed seeing her grow up, get married. Maybe now she was missing her grandchildren.

"She's about like always," Sark said, coldly. "She works for people who're useless at what they do, who don't make use of her real talents as an operative. She works constantly. She's… " He had been about to say she was still loyal to Vaughn. "She's still married to Vaughn."

"Mmm," Irina's response didn't imply judgment one way or the other. "She reminds me of myself at her age."

"Actually, she's working for me," he blurted out. Maybe Sydney was right, maybe he did have an unconscious death wish.

Irina's glare was harsh. "What do you mean, working for you?"

"I asked her to get some intel on a man I'm trying to track down."

"What was your price?" Irina was clearly confused as to why Sydney would willingly cooperate with Sark.

To hell with it. He didn't feel particularly indebted to Irina after her abandonment stunt.

"She gets to keep Vaughn in the dark about a little indiscretion." He sat back, waiting for her to shoot him under the table. Or maybe above the table, for everyone to see. That would be… dramatic.

They stared at each other without blinking. Irina looked surprised, though he wasn't sure why. Maybe it was surprise at him, or maybe at Sydney's actions; he didn't know. He had the impression that she held Sydney in a higher regard than him, her perfect firstborn. After all, she was actually Irina's blood. He was just the adopted son. But with that, she somehow held Sydney to a higher moral code than him, too.

At last she nodded, and looked away. "With you." She wouldn't look at him.

"Yes."

"Julian," she sighed, as if overcome with the weight of what this meant to her, "How could you? After all she's been through, you couldn't leave well enough alone?"

Now that hurt.

"How could I?" he mocked her with his tone, "She's _your _daughter. I would think you'd know her well enough to know she doesn't do anything she doesn't want to do. And besides," he threw in for extra sting, "Your precious Sydney is not altogether innocent in the skills of seduction."

Her slap turned his head so fast his neck cracked a little. So, that was where Sydney got that move.

Some of the other patrons of the restaurant stared at them. He didn't care what it looked like to them- a May-December lovers' spat.

"I'm sorry," she apologized almost immediately. "You didn't deserve that. You're adults, you can do what you want."

His cheek stung where her fingers had connected. "No, I deserved that."

"I'll help you," she agreed, "But you need to respect what Sydney has with Vaughn. She needs some stability, everyone does. Even you," she said, pointedly. "You know I've always looked out for your best interests. That's why I arranged for you to be sent away, away from Lazarey and your mother's troubles, where they couldn't find you until you were old enough to be on your own."

"Julian," she was the only one who ever called him by his first name, "You know that."

He just nodded.

* * *

Songs: 

1 "Rap." Gone in 60 Seconds, Groove Armada.


	14. Chapter 14

She and her father boarded the CIA jet waiting at one of the back runways at LAX. He'd made up a fake mission that only the two of them could go on as a ruse to make contact with Irina again.

She had packed that afternoon in the stillness of their house, when Vaughn had come home early.

"Hey," he'd said, sounding surprised to find her there, "You're leaving me again?"

"Yeah," she said quietly, folding a pair of jeans into her suitcase, "Dad and I are going to Germany for a quick reconnaissance, as a favor to the NSC. There's a terrorist group forming there that we need to get a lead on."

He accepted this without comment and loosened his tie. "Are you sure you want to travel again, so soon? You just got back from England."

She knew what he really was asking, which was, how are we going to have a baby if you're never here?

"Michael," she said softly, "It's fine, there's plenty of time."

She had secretly gone back on birth control. She kept the package in her desk at work.

He lay down on the bed, on top of the covers, and watched her pack. As she leaned over to place another set of shoes in her bag, he caught her left hand and said, "Hey, where are your rings?"

She stared at him, frozen. Sark had kissed the palm of her left hand in the car two days ago. There were still scratches from where she'd scrubbed it.

"Oh," she said, smiling sweetly, "I already put them in my suitcase, on my necklace. I'm kind of bloated- they were tight and I didn't want them to get stuck on." She rubbed her hard, flat stomach for emphasis.

He pulled her towards him by her left hand, onto the bed. They lay together, her head on his shoulder and his thumb in her left palm, rubbing it.

He sighed heavily, "Sometimes you make it hard to love you, you know that?"

She raised her head and frowned at him. What was that supposed to mean?

"In a good way," he assured her, smoothing her hair down with his free hand. "Like I can't pin down who you really are. You keep me guessing."

Where was this going? She needed to get to her plane.

"You know, we never talked about what happened," he said, his face against her hair. "And I'm not saying we have to right now, cuz you've gotta go—you know how your dad is when people are late—" they both chuckled at that, "But maybe we ought to. You know, sometime."

She nodded against his shoulder. They had never discussed what happened, why she hadn't told him she'd been pregnant. It was another of her secrets; she wasn't sure she even knew the real reason herself. Not to mention talking about it—getting pregnant-- made her feel like an animal, like an prize broodmare whose fertility needed to be assessed. Like she wasn't even human.

She didn't know how to _be_, how to play a mom. Her mom hadn't been around long enough for her to pick up any kind of template for that kind of alias. She couldn't even imagine what it would be like, talking to other people about their kids. What would she have to say on play dates, at YMCA swim class? She had nothing real in common to talk about with other people their age who had kids. Worst, she couldn't imagine not working, to go from… _this life_ to staying at home with a child. It made her feel simultaneously superior to women who chose to stay home, and terribly guilty and selfish for not wanting the one thing that seemed to make so many others happy.

She shoved the thoughts down that threatened to throw her into a panic, and said, "Maybe when I get back from Berlin."

"Sure," he said, sleepily. "I wish you could stay and nap with me."

"I know."

* * *

On the plane she and Jack sat mostly in silence, punctuated by occasional conversation about their "mission" to fool the air marshals flying with them.

"Sydney," Jack said after they were well over the Atlantic Ocean and the guards had moved to the rear of the plane to doze, "Is there more to your pact with Sark than intel gathering?"

"What?" she stared at him, "Why do you ask that?"

"Intuition, I guess." Jack was as casual as Jack got at work. His suit coat was off, and his tie was loose, the top button of his white dress shirt undone.

"No," she lied. "What makes you think there is?"

He cocked his head and looked at her. "Just wondering."

So as to avoid any more weird Spy Daddy moments, she pulled her iPod out of her bag and said she was going to try to sleep.

She turned on the random playlist, and was dozing off when a sultry, slow Sarah McLachlan tune came on.

_Make me a witness_

_Take me up, out of darkness_

_Out of doubt_

_I won't weigh you down_

_With good intentions_

_Won't make fire out of clay_

_Or other inventions_

_Will we burn in heaven_

_Like we do down here__1_

She kept her eyes closed and thought about Sark's scorching kiss on her hand, and tried not to burn into ashes right there under her father's watchful gaze.

* * *

Berlin sprawled out below their plane, huge and old. They were due at Tempelhof in 10 minutes. Berlin was eight times the size of Paris, but whereas Paris had sprung ahead during the latter 20th century, Berlin had remained an oasis in the vast wasteland that eastern Europe had become. Their landmarks were dilapidated, the palace of Fredrick the Great in Potsdam fallen into disrepair under the Communist rule. Still, she had always liked Berlin. They'd done several jobs here, mostly to find hackers who frequented Goth bars and sex clubs. Something about the pre-fab concrete housing structures and seeing the giant globe of the TV tower that overlooked Alexanderplatz made her heart beat a little faster. It wasn't beautiful, but stuff _happened_ here. She remembered seeing the Berliners breaking through the wall on that night in 1989, when she was 17. How young some of them had looked—they were just kids, like her, but they were doing something that was changing the world.

They hit the ground with a little squeal from the tires—there was a slight crosswind—and the plane taxied to a hanger far away from the main terminal.

They gathered their things together and disembarked. It was cool, a little windy, and Sydney wrapped her suede coat a little tighter around her. It had been two years since her dad had let Irina walk free in Russia, when she had helped them hunt down Elena and dismantle the giant Mueller device.

Her family… she sighed inaudibly to Jack, but he felt her ribs heave where he had his hand on her back.

"It'll be fine, Sydney," he said, in his quiet way. "She wants to know how you are."

_Sydney_, her mother had said, _You may not see me on your wedding day, but I'll be watching you__ i_

She nodded wordlessly and hoped that they weren't falling into some kind of elaborate trap. It wouldn't be the first time.

They were set to meet Irina in the Beate Uhse Erotikmuseum, off the Ku'Damm in former West Berlin.

After dropping their things at the CIA safe house, they made their way on the S-Bahn, the elevated city train, to the former West sector. Once at the museum, they bought tickets to the special exhibit—a selection of Oriental erotic art— and strode through the tourist shop full of American college students and other tourists to the museum entrance. She caught her dad sneaking a glance at her after he saw a life-sized mannequin dressed in black leather dominatrix gear. Silently, she shook her head at him and he seemed relieved.

There was a movie theater on the 2nd floor of the museum, a historical retrospective about Uhse's life. She had founded the company after WWII because even German women needed porn and sexual satisfaction, according to some signage Sydney had read on the way up the escalator.

They went in, to the little hard benches without backs, and sat down. There was no one else in the theater.

They were just getting wrapped up in the retrospective when Irina sat down on the bench behind them.

Silently, she placed her hand on Sydney's shoulder.

Sydney turned and looked at her mother. Irina still looked amazing, though she looked at Sydney almost sadly before she said, "Sweetheart, it's so good to see you."

What had that been, Sydney wondered, but she turned and embraced her mother then anyway.

"Have you been well," Irina asked, her eyes a little teary. "How is Vaughn?"

"Good, good," she was getting a little choked up too. "He's fine," she whispered. Why were they whispering, it wasn't like there was anyone else they could disturb.

Her mother placed one of her long slender hands on her cheek, rubbed the water off Sydney's cheekbone then, and said, "Good. I'm glad you're happy."

Sydney ached to blurt out the whole awful truth to her mother; _no, Mom, it's not fine, it's anything but, I was already losing him and it's my own stupid fault, then I lost our baby and slept with another man and now…_ But she couldn't say that.

Jack turned then and stood. "Irina."

"Jack." They were cordial, but the past was irreconcilable. They were meant to meet like ships passing in the night, two forces so strong they almost pushed each other apart like magnets that were polarized the wrong way.

"I need your help," Jack began, "We need intel about a woman named Anastasia Szarkochev."

At the mention of her name, Irina's eyes flicked towards Sydney for a split second, then she said, "I know."

"You know?" Sydney was confused. "I don't understand."

"Sark contacted me," Irina confessed. "I had told him his mother was dead, to keep him from tracking her down when he began working for me, 12 years ago."

At the mention of his name, Sydney's stomach began to produce an insane amount of acid. She had had ulcers on and off over the years, basically since she'd begun working as an operative at SD-6. If Sark had contacted her mother, it couldn't mean anything good.

"He was as confused as you are, when his acquaintance sent him the picture of his mother. It was my mistake for letting it go this long without telling him the truth," Irina admitted.

"Let's get out of here," Jack suggested, "And go somewhere we can talk."

* * *

Songs:

1 "Witness." Surfacing, Sarah McLachlan.

* * *

Episodes:

i Before the Flood. Season 4, Episode 22 . Written by Josh Appelbaum & André Nemec.


	15. Chapter 15

They relocated to a café down the street, one with pleasant ochre colored walls and little round glass tables. The glass was so thick that it looked blue-green instead of clear. There was a single red gerbera daisy in clear glass vases on the tables.

"_I have a crush on a guy at work," she had finally said, breaking the awkward silence._

"_Really? Who is he?" _

"_Someone in my… department," she admitted, "We've worked together for about a year now." _

"_You're kidding me," Francie was on the verge of a smile. "What's his name?" _

_She hesitated, tracing the rim of her coffee cup with her nail, because it felt weird, for about a million reasons: they weren't allowed to date, he had a girlfriend, and because just saying it was strange, as if saying it out loud would make it true that she really did have feelings for him: "Michael." _

"_And he's…" she continued, not knowing why—why even entertain the thought--but Francie seemed so interested, "I don't even know how to describe him. He's smart, and he's funny… And he's so cute," she grinned despite her best effort not to and looked at the floor. _

"_Hot-cute, not goofy-cute?" Francie clarified._

"_Hot-cute," she had agreed, meeting her friend's eyes. _

_They giggled for a second, and Francie asked, "So why haven't I met this guy?" _

_It seemed like such an obvious question—who wouldn't ask? "Oh," she waved her hand, "He has a girlfriend." _

"_Of course he does," Francie seemed disgusted. It had been so long since she'd seen Sydney like this. Not since before Danny, certainly._

"_Which is ultimately irrelevant anyway," Sydney interjected quickly, "Because the bank has a policy against coworkers dating."_

"_You know," Francie was trying to say it nicely, "You could quit." _

"_Francie--"_

"_Look, I dunno what kind of a hold that place has on you—"_

"_They don't have anything on me, I just _can't quit my job_i__" _

They ordered a round of stiff German coffee and looked at each other, expectantly.

Irina flipped her lion's mane of hair over her left shoulder and looked at them before she began to speak. "When I was a teenager, I was recommended by my teachers at the academy for a test that the government used to recruit agents into the KGB. I didn't want to take it, but my mother- your grandmother, Sydney," she looked at her daughter, "Encouraged me to go ahead with it. It was an opportunity most people would never have, to do something different, something exciting," Irina rolled her eyes slightly at the memory.

Sydney wondered briefly if they were supposed to feel sorry for Irina. She decided she couldn't do that.

"So, long story short, off I went to the training for female operatives," Irina glossed over the early part of her training with a dismissive wave. "It was there that I met Anastasia, and Nikola as well."

"Sark's mother, and Lazarey's wife," Jack confirmed.

Irina nodded and took a sip of the coffee the waiter had put down in front of them. "We were so young, and so proud to have been chosen to serve our country," she reminisced, even smiled a little at the memory. "Anastasia was the boldest of us, she would play pranks on the less advanced girls, and easily the most beautiful- she had that hair, that fiery red hair—like a sunset over Moscow in the winter time."

Sydney tried not to think of the woman in the picture. It disturbed her, thinking about it.

"Even in those days, the government was interested in Rambaldi, in his work," she said, her smile disappearing. "They were also interested in getting rid of any vestiges of the old Russia. You know your history. Stalin wanted to drag Russia into the modern age, whether it was kicking and screaming or not. Much like Peter the Great wanted to, but with far less finesse.

"There were always rumors that some of the Romanovs had survived the revolution," she shook her head, "But no one knew where they were, or how much they were worth."

Jack glowered. "Lazarey was a Romanov, then."

"You're ruining my storytime, Jack," she admonished him, but she smiled coyly.

Sydney looked between them, uncomfortable. She didn't like it when her parents got flirty with each other. Parental sex was freaky, even when it was Spy Parent Sex.

"Anyway, yes," Irina agreed with his conclusion. "Andrian Lazarey was a Romanov. So the KGB tasked Nikola to go to Bucharest, seduce and marry Lazarey, and hopefully produce a son who would inherit his fortune- something on the order of more than half a billion dollars in today's money."

"But she had a girl," Sydney breathed, realizing how many people's lives must have played out this way. Her mother's, Sark's mother's, shit, for all they knew, maybe Vaughn's mother had been a double.

"Correct," Irina nodded her approval at Sydney. "I see you've done your homework." I _also see you've done Sark_, she left off.

"Nikola gave birth to Natashya after she and Lazarey had been together barely a year," Irina continued, "And that was when the trouble began. Up until that point, Lazarey had been a loving, doting husband. But after Natashya was born… he became abusive towards Nikola, particularly, but also towards his own daughter," Irina's eyes were dark with the memory of it. "Nikola begged to be reassigned, with the baby, but the agency made her stay put.

She glanced at Jack. "I was the lucky one amongst us," she said. "I was lucky to be sent marry a good man."

Jack only blinked in response. They both knew good was a relative term in matters like this.

"When the agency saw that its plan wasn't working, they sent Anastasia after Nikola to Bucharest to seduce Lazarey and get pregnant, this time hopefully with a son."

Jack sighed disgustedly. He was less enamored with the concept of countries and their governments with each passing year.

"So Julian was born within a year of Natashya," Irina said, "And Anastasia suffered the same fate at Lazarey's hands. He was decent enough to pay for her apartment—well, he really couldn't afford not to, she threatened to make their 'affair' public, wreck his career—" Irina smiled, "She did always have a flair for the dramatic."

"Not long after that, I got the order to get out of my assignment," she carefully avoided looking at them, "And I escaped back to Russia."

"I was in touch with them both, through letters and cipher books," she explained, "But I didn't realize the gravity of their situation until I got back to Russia. By then Elena had risen to a position of considerable power within the KGB," Irina shook her head at the memory of her oldest sister, "And she was already possessed by the pursuit of the Rambaldi artifacts. She knew, somewhere down the line, she'd need a massive amount of funding to bring Rambaldi's prophecy to fruition."

"It was Elena who had tasked Nikola and Anastasia to the Lazarey matter, so she knew full well the importance Sark had in the matter. I had to extract them."

"You were the one who arranged for Sark to be sent to England," Sydney finally pieced it together. So their work together wasn't happenstance at all.

Irina drained her coffee cup and nodded as she swallowed. "I arranged for him to go away from Anastasia and Lazarey, from their craziness. And away from the eye of the KGB, until he was old enough to claim his inheritance rightfully. Elena would have killed him in a second if had meant she could lay hands on his money sooner," she said, and it was obvious then to both Jack and Sydney that Irina was much closer to Sark than either of them had previously realized.

"I had had Nadia by then of course," Irina looked at Sydney sadly, "So it was like I had three children I could never see, instead of just you girls."

Sydney almost felt sorry for her. Almost.

* * *

Sark was back in Cheltenham within a matter of hours after his meeting with Irina in London. The British railway system was certainly one thing he missed when he was elsewhere.

He made the rounds for the horses, greeting each one by name, patting them under their manes, where they were a little damp with sweat in the summer heat.

Back in the house, he turned the alarm system on and laid on the couch in the den.

So Irina disapproved of his methods? That was rare. He shouldn't have told her about his bargain with Sydney.

Sark reached into the neckline of his shirt and pulled out her chain, with her rings. He'd put it on for safekeeping. It wasn't much good to him if he lost it.

Her fingers were fairly slender, he observed by the size of the rings. The engagement ring had just a single, fairly small diamond on it, and the actual wedding band was just plain white gold. It was very Sydney, he decided. She didn't seem like the glitzy jewelry type.

As much as you can know anyone's type, Sark thought grimly. He was becoming steadily more convinced that there never is a single person in any given body. Each of them was just a collection of aliases. Granted, some had more complicated uses for their aliases than others, but everyone did it: pretended to be someone they weren't while at work, put on a brave face to hide their pain at a funeral, acted the part of the elated friend when a best friend gets engaged to your former lover. And some people were more skilled than others at switching between the aliases. It was those individuals, he decided, who wound up as agents. The ones who could call up the appropriate lie for any given situation without any prep, any real connection to the world to set it in motion.

Irina's slap still stung, though more figuratively than literally. He'd been asking for it, taunting Sydney like that to Irina's face, but shit. It was like she put all the responsibility for their affair squarely on him. And that was hardly the situation at all.

He'd turned it over and over in his mind over the last week. She'd been sitting on the couch here, and when he'd turned back from the bookshelf, she'd stood up and beckoned him to her. He hadn't hesitated—it fit perfectly into his plan—but then it had gotten out of control. Way out of control. He wondered what was going on with Sydney. She was a tough nut, like her mother, but she seemed to be somewhat unhinged after their fling. When he'd kissed her hand that night in the car, she hadn't tried to kill him. She'd just stared at him like… he didn't know like what.

He reached above his head to the end table and picked up the stereo remote. It hummed to life and he pressed play. He didn't know what was in the CD player.

_Sucker love is heaven sent_

_You pucker up, our passion's spent_

_My heart's a tart, your body's rent_

_My body's broken, yours is bent._

Oh, right--Placebo. Without You I'm Nothing. He liked this album.

_Carve your name into my arm _

_Instead of stressed I lie here charmed_

_Cuz there's nothing else to do_

_Every me and every you._

He'd had it. This plan wasn't being executed as he desired—he needed to force its hand, so to speak. He was up off the couch in a fluid motion, and over to the desk.

_Sucker love is known to swing_

_Prone to cling and waste these things_

_Pucker up for heaven's sake_

_There's never been so much at stake._

He unclasped the chain from around his neck and set the rings on the desk in front of him. In the drawer, he found a fountain pen and a piece of stationary.

_I serve my head up on a plate_

_It's only comfort, calling late_

_Cuz there's nothing else to do_

_Every me and every you_

_Every me and every you_

_Every me… _

_This_, he printed in his smallish, slanted printing, trying not to drag his hand through the wet ink—curse of the lefthander—_is for my shoulder_.

_Like the naked leads the blind_

_I know I'm selfish, I'm unkind_

_Sucker love I always find_

_Someone to bruise and leave behind_

By now he knew their address by heart; he'd followed her that many times.

_All alone in space and time_

_There's nothing here but what's here's mine_

_Something borrowed, something blue_

_Every me and every you…__1_

_

* * *

_Songs:

1 "Every Me Every You." Without You I'm Nothing, Placebo.

* * *

Episodes: 

i A Higher Echelon. Season 2, Episode 11. Written by John Eisendrath.


	16. Chapter 16

In Berlin, Sydney and her mother walked slowly along the Ku'Damm together. Jack had already gone back to the safe house to collect their things; she was going to meet him at Tempelhof in an hour. They window shopped a little, talked even less. They didn't have an easy rapport with each other; years of separation and mistrust had seen to that.

"Sydney," her mother said just when Sydney had decided she couldn't bear the silence any longer, "Is everything alright between you and Vaughn?"

They stopped in front of a KDW display window full of nippleless mannequins modeling bikinis and sarongs, and stood facing each other. "Why?" Sydney's eyes narrowed, wondering what brought her mother's sudden concern on.

Irina cocked her head to the side and shrugged, "Your father said your health hasn't been so good."

"Oh," Sydney replied. "Yeah, it's fine now. I just…" She squinted a little, and looked to the side. "It's hard, my only having half my eggs, you know?"

Irina was silent. She hadn't intended for Sydney to have the same kind of life she'd lead. Jack had messed that up by testing the project on her, with the intention of protecting her. But Sloane had gotten to her first.

"I know this sounds completely obvious," Irina started, "But keeping secrets from each other will wreck your marriage."

Sydney just stared at Irina. She knew! He had told her!

There was the hot flush, and, ohhhh. Dizziness. She would've murdered Sark if he'd been there.

She sank down on the edge of a stone planter and put her head between her knees. A couple passers-by stopped and offered to call an ambulance, but Irina had deflected them, saying she was feeling faint because she might be pregnant.

_Shut up, Mom!_ She thought. How embarrassing.

"Sydney," Irina pleaded with her, the palm of her hand warm on the back of Sydney's neck, "It's not my place to tell you what you can or can't do. I haven't been a mother enough to dictate that to you at this point. But why? Why do this?"

She sat up suddenly, her eyes full of hot tears. "You'll have to forgive me if I don't want to hear moral advice from you, Mom."

Irina pursed her lips. That was fair. She sank down on one knee, about eye level with Sydney. "Sweetheart, about Julian…" she trailed off. What did she even want to say? "I don't believe he will betray you. Not when it really matters. But he has very little in the way of connections to other people. Real connections, the kind you have with Vaughn."

Sydney felt like she might be sick to her stomach. The coffee churned with enough acid to etch glass in her midsection. It completely freaked her out that her mother called Sark by his first name. That she had slept with him, when Irina obviously practically thought of him as her son. Sydney's little brother.

"Mom, everything's been so messed up between us," she finally did allow the tears to leak from her eyes. "He wants to have kids and I don't, and I was pregnant but I lost it and I hadn't told him and—" She wasn't even sure what good it was going to do, telling Irina this, but whatever. The words came out in a jumble, spilling over each other in a barely coherent string. "And we're just so fucking normal on the surface, his mom doesn't even know what we do, and Dad's all weirded out by everything and underneath it's all just… sick," she finished, for lack of a better word. "I just can't anymore, it makes me sick to even think of it, trying to have a baby with us both being agents, what if something happened to one of us because I can't, I can't do it by myself."

Irina's eyes filled with big, fat tears then, too, and she forced herself to look away, at the display window of KDW to keep herself from crying. Sydney's desperation pained her in a way that she couldn't even fathom. It was so like the pain of her friends when they were undercover and things weren't going as planned.

"Sydney," Irina said softly, "You have to talk to him. He's only a man, not a mindreader. Does he even know how you feel?"

Sydney sniffed and shook her head. "We were supposed to talk when I get back."

"Honestly, sweetheart," Irina said, "Is talking to him worse than putting yourself through this stress? He loves you, you know that. Just talk to him."

She nodded wordlessly. It seemed so simple it might actually work. Sometimes she over thought things too much. She would talk to him—about the pregnancy thing, not the Other Thing Which Needed To Stay Secret.

"You need to meet your father," Irina said, handing her a Kleenex.

They hailed a cab, and hugged briefly before she climbed in. Once in awhile, her Spy Mommy came through.

* * *

Back in LA, Vaughn was just getting home from work. It was Thursday. Sydney would be home in the wee hours of Friday morning. 

He'd been at Weiss's place for awhile after work, watching some hockey and generally avoiding all serious subjects. Weiss had been acting kind of weird towards him since Sydney's miscarriage, presumably because he felt awkward, knowing that they were trying to have a baby. But tonight hadn't been so bad. It had been just about like old times, when he and Sydney would hang out with Nadia and Weiss. Before Nadia had gone into WPP, after the whole blowup back in Sevogda with Elena and Sloane.

He was pretty nuts, he smiled, to have asked her to marry him right before they'd jumped out of the cargo plane into a city full of homicidal maniacs hopped up on Rambaldi juice. But she'd been right to tell him to wait. They'd pull through it.

_Ask me again on the beach_, she'd said. So he had. And she'd said yes.

Barefoot, he sifted through the mail on the couch. LADWP bill, letter from Sydney's alma matter asking for money, a card from an aunt who used to kiss him on the lips—until he was 21—and a brown paper envelope that had no return address.

_M. Vaughn_, the address said, and it was postmarked in London. It was one of those envelopes that was padded because it was comprised of several layers of paper rather than bubble wrap.

He slit it open with their letter opener, and looked inside. There was a note, folded in half.

He shook it out and unfolded in. It was creased into a little packet.

_This is for my shoulder_, it read.

Below it, Sydney's engagement ring was taped with Scotch tape to the paper.

What the fuck was this? He stood up quickly, then sat back down.

_This is for my shoulder_.

_This is for my shoulder_?

Did someone have her? His mind went crazy- call the office, find out where she and Jack had gone, had they checked in?

No.

No, wait--she hadn't had her rings on yesterday afternoon. She'd said they were already packed.

This is for my shoulder.

_Sark_. He had broken Sark's shoulder, and his nose when he'd been looking for Lauren and they had Sark in their custody.

But she hadn't been in contact with him. She'd only surveilled him. Right? That was the protocol for her mission to England. Surveillance only.

Vaughn pried the ring loose and inspected it. It was intact, it didn't appear to be damaged, or bugged.

He leaned back on the couch and thought about it. He didn't understand, what this was supposed to mean.

This is for my shoulder.

And then, another possibility occurred to him, but he pushed it down. No. There was no way.

* * *

Several extremely stiff drinks later, Vaughn lay on their couch in a haze. By this point his alcohol-soaked brain had imagined them in nearly every position he could possibly think of, and some other stuff to boot. 

He didn't think Sark had raped her. Sydney was strong enough to have fought him off, especially with a bum shoulder. So, what then? He couldn't fathom that she would've slept—why did people say that, there was no sleeping involved—with Sark.

Things had been weird between them since the miscarriage, he accepted that. But they'd turned a corner. They were moving on from it.

"_Sark asked you to come work with him?" He could barely believe that someone would stop in the middle of an op to try to recruit their enemy. _

"_Like it wasn't even a question, like it was a done deal," she'd confirmed. Then, a weird smile as she'd looked at her hands in her lap, "Sark is like the good-looking guy in high school who knows how cute he is and won't take no for an answer."_

_He moved on—hearing her talk about Sark made him feel awkward. "Any suspicious reaction to the map you gave SD-6?__i__" _

He realized, with a weird sinking feeling, that this was two of his wives that Sark had bedded.

That was why he'd broken his shoulder—for that cocksucker comment Sark had made:

_How embarrassing it must have been, to learn that the woman who was sharing your bed was only using you as an unfortunate means to an end. But then, she wasn't sharing your bed lately then, was she? She was in mine. Or in my car. Or in the elevator. Or a garage. Or there was this one time- this is my favorite—we were engaged in an alley and she called to tell you she loved you. That woman was deliciously filthy. __ii_

Vaughn had shoved down on Sark's left shoulder then, at the same time holding Sark's arm behind him, twisted. _Crunch_.

He hated Sark, he decided. Hate with a capital "H", the kind you only reserve for child molesters and maybe… Hm, maybe for particularly awful dictators like Hitler, or Pinochet.

He'd already wanted to kill Sark when they were on that op in Paris, and he had tried to maneuver her into giving their mark some kind of kinky sex show. That had apparently been Sark's routine with Lauren. Goodness knows _he'd_ never gotten any subversive action out of her.

He shoved the mental images of that down. He'd watched Sydney kiss Sark through his binoculars, from an upper level of the club. How she'd bitten his lip around the lime. Sark had the decency to look surprised, but he'd squeezed Sydney's ass as she'd bitten him. He'd liked it.

The first time Sydney had bitten his own lip like that, Vaughn had been surprised. He'd assumed it was an accident, until he had looked up at her. She had been sitting on him, in a tight t-shirt and tiny shorts. Just the thought of her in the tiny shorts kind of made him hard.

She had just stared at him, deadpan, and he knew it wasn't accidental. Still, he'd porn slapped her bottom, more like the side of her thigh, actually, but she kept looking at him.

Then she'd cracked him one across the face. Her slap was almost as hard as a punch, it was so sudden.

He remembered thinking for a second that she was out of her damn mind. You don't hit girls. Then the realization dawned on him that she wanted him to.

He felt bad about it for awhile, the violence of their sex life, but had adjusted to it. He'd never been with a girl like that, one who was harder than he was, so aggressive.

It was fine until now. It freaked him out to think they could conceive a baby, being so… so, what? He didn't even know what the word was for it. When he thought about his parents having sex, which was admittedly a subject he thought about as little as possible, their routine wounding of one another seemed completely incompatible with his notion of what parental sex should be like.

He couldn't imagine having a talk with his potential son or daughter, and trying to explain that sometimes, people in love liked to...

Dear God, his mental images of her with Sark tortured him.

He glanced at his watch. Their plane was due in an hour. No way would he be sober enough in time to pick her up.

Let her get a limo, he thought before Jack Daniels overcame him and he passed out.

* * *

Episodes: 

i Dead Drop. Season 2, Episode 4. Written by Jesse Alexander.

ii Resurrection. Season 3, Episode 22. Written by Jeff Pinkner.


	17. Chapter 17

Sark lay in the bathtub of the hotel in Los Angeles. By now the desk clerk downstairs gave him a real smile when he came into the lobby. He'd been slipping the guy fifties to keep Sydney's calls coming through.

He felt rash, impulsive. His checkmate, sending Vaughn the first ring, was hopefully going to speed up the intel he needed from her on Wells. Irina didn't know where Anastasia was. She had been alive after all, but then dropped off the map several years back.

Sark's blonde hair stuck up in several places on his head, and he shifted so that his bad shoulder was fully submerged. It always started aching after he'd been flying.

He dried his hand on a towel and picked up The English Patient.

_We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up, as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for this all to be marked on my body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography—to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map, like the names of rich men and women on buildings. _

His mind wandered. He thought of Sydney. She would have a really interesting body map one day. She wasn't one to become tied down, attached. Not unlike himself.

* * *

After 30 minutes and several calls to his cell phone that went unanswered, Sydney was beginning to get worried that something had happened to Vaughn.

Finally, she hailed a town car from the taxi stand and gave the elderly man her address.

"Are you just coming home," he'd tried to make conversation with her.

"Yes," she smiled, "I'm just getting in from a business trip." See. Like that. Normal. You can play normal just fine.

So not normal, she told herself.

She put the limo on her agency credit card, not feeling a trace of guilt that she was using taxpayer funds to pay for a limo to get home from a trip that wasn't actually pertinent to national security.

The lights were still on in the house. It was 4:30 in the morning. Maybe he'd forgotten to pick her up, and was waiting up for her?

She opened the side door, by the garage, which was left unlocked.

"Michael?" she called out. The TV was on, the lights were on, but he wasn't in the kitchen or the living room. She flicked the TV off and the sudden silence of the house creeped her out.

She walked down the hall to their bedroom, where she could make out the shape of him lying on the bed. His clothes were still on, and he wasn't under the covers. She shook her head but smiled; every once in awhile he and Weiss tore it up and he'd come home and sleep in his clothes.

She turned off the kitchen light and quickly undressed. She'd get under the covers- it was a too little chilly not to. Just as her head hit the pillow, she felt something under it, under her hair.

What? She sat up and turned around.

Her ring.

Lying on her pillow.

She'd always thought it was dumb when people said their heart had stopped, but she knew what they meant by it now. It was like any beat might be her last, and her heart would just… cease beating.

She fainted then, in anger at Sark and out of sheer exhaustion. The trip, her little breakdown to Irina, and now this?

There was only so much even she could take.

* * *

When Sydney awoke, she couldn't tell how long she'd been unconscious; it felt like years, but then, it always felt that way when she had fainted, as though she'd slept 100 years. She glanced at the clock: 5:47.

Ok, she hadn't been asleep that long. Her ring was back on her finger, had she done that? She couldn't remember. Michael was no longer next to her.

She lay still, trying not to breathe heavily, lest she pass out again.

How could he have done this? She was working on her end of the bargain, she was trying to hunt down Wells, and Sark had done this anyway? What was wrong with him?

_He has very little in the way of connections to other people. Real connections_, her mother had said. This statement presumed that Sydney had real connections, something she was beginning to doubt.

Just then, she heard a noise in the hallway. Vaughn.

He appeared in the doorway, and they both froze when they saw each other. He put his hand up on the door frame and leaned on it, still looking at her.

She could see it, in his eyes. He had already pieced together what had happened, at least between her and Sark.

"Hi," she tried.

He came over and sat down beside her on the bed without a word. Now he wouldn't look at her.

"Michael," she started, but he cut her off.

"Don't," he whispered. "How long?"

"How long what?" she was honestly confused in her faint state.

"How long," Vaughn's voice was low, quiet, "have you been seeing him?"

"It's not like that." Did he really think she might have been carrying on a long-term affair with Sark?

"Really?" his voice was sharp with anger now. "So tell me, what _is_ it like? Is it better? Was I just not enough for you? Because honestly, Syd, I don't get it."

"I haven't been seeing him," she pleaded, "Until last week, I had no idea where he was. But…"

She could see Vaughn's eyes were filling with tears. She could only remember him crying one other time.

"We only…" She trailed off, realizing that they weren't a 'we', she and Sark. "It was just once."

"Then that's once more that I've cheated," he looked at her finally, "God, Syd, I thought you and I… We aren't like that. You can tell me stuff, you know? Two years ago, when we got married, I meant it when I said I would look after you for better or for worse, in sickness and in health and all that crap—how could you not do the same for me?"

"We made a deal," she tried to explain, knowing any explanation she could offer wouldn't be enough, "That I get him intel and he wouldn't send my rings home—he'd already taken them anyway, he knew about Chechnya, how I—" Her voice caught in her throat, in the beginning of a sob, "I only meant to play him, but—"

"But it went too far?" Vaughn wasn't surprised by this at all. Sark's specialty was pushing people that last little bit they needed to do something really terrible to another person. Like killing Francie. Or seducing Lauren. Or Sydney.

She curled on her side in a ball and nodded. She closed her eyes then, and Vaughn hated the thought that she was probably thinking about fucking Sark. It killed him a little, inside, somewhere in his chest.

Vaughn heard himself asking the question before he'd really consciously decided he wanted to know the answer. "So he likes it, too—how you are?"

"Michael," she sighed, her eyes still closed.

_Yes. Yes, he likes it rough. _

The unspoken words hung between them, killing Them, killing Vaughn's fantasy of her as somehow belonging to him, of her as a mother to his children, of them growing old gracefully together. She was irreconcilably different than him.

The person he loved was like one of her aliases to him, a fleeting, temporal thing that cannot ever be fully grasped, because as soon as you get a hold of it, you realize it never existed in the first place.

* * *

She had gone to the shower then, and he'd stood at the door, watching as she'd taken off her clothes. He noticed for the first time, as she pulled down the waistband of her pants, the line of peculiar bruises that went from below her belly button, next to the scar from the Covenant operation, down to where her underwear normally started.

From… him. He refused to even think of Sark by name.

When she'd turned away from him, to step into the shower, he saw the bruises on the back of each of her shoulders, four little round dots from his fingertips.

_I wish for this all to be marked on my body when I am dead._

He'd left her alone when she started sobbing, audibly, over the sound of the water. He couldn't share the grief of someone who was like a stranger to him.


	18. Chapter 18

Sark woke at 7, when the shaft of sunlight hit his face around the edge of the heavy hotel drapes. He yawned and stretched, his aching shoulder still sore, and he thought about what he had to do today.

Not really much of anything, he decided. Her ring had probably reached Vaughn by now, though he wasn't sure how that would play out. Either it would go his way, or they would surprise him and stick by one another.

He suspected Irina hoped his plan would backfire, that Sydney and Vaughn would be able to reconcile the fact that she had willingly cheated with him. To him it was curious, the notion of marital fidelity. Like any two people could possibly satisfy every need the other might have, indefinitely. Forever.

He hoped, in a cruel, Schadenfreude kind of way, that it went his way. He didn't like to lose.

Schadenfreude. It was such a good word. The Germans—he loved how their language was like Legos, how they stuck together three and four individual words to make meaning of one giant conglomerate.

_Schaden_- damages, pain, suffering. _Freude_- pleasure, enjoyment. _Schaden ist die schönste Freude_, wasn't that the phrase?

It was like the Germans were linguistically programmed to understand S&M.

He chuckled when he thought it, and then the phone rang. So. She was home from Berlin.

"Hello," he said, just in case it wasn't her.

"Fuck you." That was all she said, and hung up.

He placed the receiver back on the base and smiled.

The phone rang again.

"What?" he asked this time, sure it was her ringing him again.

"You are an even bigger bastard than I thought," she started, and he could hear that she was on her cell phone. "I was stupid to fuck you, but you're even stupider to fuck up your end of our deal."

"Sydney," he said mildly, "I really have no idea what you're talking about."

"Don't be coy," her voice had some static in it, "I was getting your intel, you didn't need to send the ring to him."

He was silent, considering this. She was right, but… this was way more fun.

"I take it my package arrived safely."

"Arrrgh!" she growled, and hung up on him again.

Sark threw back the covers and decided to get dressed. She might show up at the hotel, and though he liked to be naked, it wasn't the best way to meet someone who was likely to try to kill you.

He rapped, as he turned the shower on:

_Pulled around tugged and shoved as people we could expose those as rogue and evil to the sound of siren or the mayday, they say, come follow me, but to be frank I did it my way._

_

* * *

_

She drove without really seeing where she was even going, aimlessly, first to the playground where they'd rendezvoused at midnight, past the park where she ran when she was working as a double for the CIA, and wound up in downtown at the hotel.

She didn't know what to do, whether she should kill him or not. Part of her wasn't sure why she was so angry—because he had told her mom? Because he'd double crossed her? For wrecking whatever semblance of normal life she'd been able to forge with Vaughn?

She parked her car in the garage and went inside the lobby. She didn't want to go up to his room. If they were alone, she would kill him, without question. Hotels didn't care who you were.

She strode confidently, the Bristow strut, to the front desk and looked the clerk in the eye. "Hi there," she said sweetly, "I need your help. I understand an old friend is staying here, and I'm supposed to meet him, but I'm afraid I've forgotten his room number."

The clerk looked at her and smiled. So this was the "old friend" of the young blonde Englishman. She wasn't old, nor did she appear to be just a friend. Not bad, not bad at all, his eyes wandered to her breasts under her suit jacket.

"I'll let him know you're here," he smiled slyly, knowing she had seen him undressing her with his eyes.

He turned away to dial the switchboard and Sydney blushed, just a little. She was still slightly embarrassed when someone flirted overtly with her.

"He says he'll meet you in the restaurant in 10 minutes, miss," the clerk told her. "Have a… nice day."

She thanked him and tried not to walk any differently, even though she knew he was looking at her legs as she walked away.

She settled into one of the upholstered chairs in the restaurant, and stared at the menu without really seeing the words. It was a one-page laminate sheet, and it all looked very expensive. Maybe the Agency could pick this up as well.

The tables had heavy cream-colored cloths on them, the kind that just brushed the edge of the carpet by your feet. She slipped her feet out of her heels and rubbed her toes in the carpet, through her nylons.

Why did she bother to dress up for work, she thought idly, everyone seemed to be able to see right through her façade of a Nice Government Worker. That she was one sick puppy, a woman who didn't want babies and who liked to have her husband slap her around.

There were white peonies in a vase on the bar, and the light from a window refracted in the water, making little rainbows on the carpet. Not that the carpet was anything special. Kind of a mauve, with little cream dots. Hotel carpet.

"Hello, Sydney," his voice behind her made her jump. He slipped into the chair across from her before she could even turn, and he smiled at her. A real smile, with his eyes and everything.

"How about you cut the crap," she said, her voice steely. "And tell me what you're really up to."

His Kenneth Cole-shod foot bumped her bare toes under the table and she jerked so hard her knee hit the underside of the table.

He only closed his eyes in response, and kept smiling. He couldn't have looked more amused.

"I'm not up to anything," he replied finally. "Whatever would make you think that?"

She stared at him. He was in dress clothes, grey slacks and a white button down, but it was unbuttoned two holes at the collar, and she could see the little dip at the top of his chest, where his collarbones were knit together. _Supersternal notch_, her brain repeated from memory.

"I felt you were being a little… circuitous in your investigation of Mr. Wells," he offered. "I had hoped I might be on his trail by now."

"You told my mother that we slept together."

"Yes."

"Why."

He shrugged, and looked at the silverware, adjusted the knife's handle so that it was exactly equidistant from the spoon along its entire length. "We've always been close, she and I. You told your father about our deal."

"Yes," she spat, "Our deal. How about we talk about that. About how you were not to send my rings to my husband—_my husband_—unless I didn't deliver your intel? You knew I was working on it, you sonuvabitch, and you did it anyway. You know, some people," and by 'people' she meant Vaughn, not herself, "Have feelings. Have… connections to other people that are genuine, ones that aren't based on lies and deceit."

"Really?" he said, bored. "You speak as if you know something about that. Please, tell me what that's like. Because I apparently don't know."

She gritted her teeth together so hard her molars made a squeaking sound. He was so right about her. Who did she have a connection to? Not to Vaughn—not anymore. Her very mother was… a fiction.

* * *

"Sydney, be serious," he said, and he reached under the table to grab her bare foot. She stared at him, frozen. The same stare from the night in his rental car, three days ago. She didn't resist as he placed her foot on his leg, under the table cloth, and ran his thumb over the inside of her arch, through her stockings.

She was so prim on the outside. He loved it, just a little bit, how she dressed up to go to work. He'd waited outside their house, to see her come out in the morning, gorgeous in her utter lack of awareness that he was tracking her. Skirts, blouses, suit jackets. Her work wardrobe was largely dark colors, occasionally punctuated by a light-colored blouse, but nothing outrageous. She didn't wear a lot of color. Her ears weren't pierced, and she didn't wear any jewelry on her hands aside from her wedding bands.

He noticed that she had on the diamond band.

Her dark, straight hair was in a pony tail, but there were a few feathers that were hanging out loose around her face.

"Let go of my foot," she fairly growled at him, but he wasn't really holding it tightly.

"Why don't you get up and walk away," he teased, "You're not tied down this time."

* * *

She willed herself to move, to wrench her foot away from his grasp, away from the steady, even pressure of his thumb against the bottom of her foot—she was very ticklish, but she wasn't laughing.

She simply couldn't move.

Just then the waiter walked up and said, "Will you folks be ordering anything today?"

"No, thanks," she said, and she couldn't meet the man's eyes. She could feel her eyelids, so heavy they felt like she couldn't blink or she wouldn't be able to open them again, ever. Like driving home from the airport after she'd been with him in England. Like the first time she and Vaughn had been able to go home together after the CIA had brought down the Alliance.

Like right now in this hotel restaurant with Sark deliberately coming on to her even after he'd wrecked her marriage.

"Ok," the waiter shrugged and walked away. He and the bartender exchanged glances. This wasn't that weird to them. There were a lot of high class escorts in the area.

"I think you're hungry," Sark said quietly, pointedly, "I know I am."

She nodded and stood up, slipping her feet into her shoes while holding onto the back of her chair. She was sick. Completely sick. And she didn't care.

They walked, without touching, to the elevator. Sark hesitated for a minute before pressing the button, like he couldn't remember what floor the room was on. Oh, yeah. Four.

They didn't look at each other, but Sydney couldn't resist tracing her pinky down the side of his hand where it hung at his side between them. He had very firm hands, she recalled thickly. Her nipples were so hard under her blouse, in her bra, that it hurt a little when she shifted and the cloth moved over them.

He put his hand over hers and squeezed his fingers between hers, which she didn't bend to close over his.

She and Irina had the same, freakishly long masculine hands, he noticed as he turned and slipped her engagement ring off her left hand.

_Ding._


	19. Chapter 19

Room 447 was stuffy and dark. He hadn't bothered to open the drapes to the white Los Angeles sun. It seemed appropriate, somehow, that this time they would be in the dark.

She walked into the room in front of him, and he closed the door behind him and locked the deadbolt, but not without putting out the Do Not Disturb sign. It didn't look as though the maids had been there yet- the bed was unmade, the glass from the bathroom was still on the bedside table with several swallows of water left in it.

She put a hand on the TV to steady herself and stepped out of her heels again. They were the Blahnik slingbacks he'd seen her wearing a few days ago. Classic, conservative, and still somehow outrageously sexy with her heel bare like that.

She turned back to him and stood there, looking up at him. She was a good four inches shorter than him without her shoes.

"Sydney," he started to say, but she shook her head.

"Don't," she sounded like she might cry. He looked at her and placed her ring on top of the television, near where her hand had been.

"Don't call me by my name, like you know me," her whisper trembled. "I don't even know who I am."

He might've felt sympathy for her, if he wasn't already beyond feeling anything besides overwhelming desire to have her fuck him senseless. They could talk about the higher philosophy of their business another time.

He sank onto the edge of the bed in front of her, and she straddled him with her skirt hiked up to mid-thigh, her palms on the sides of his face. She bent her mouth to his, and an instant after their lips met, she slipped her tongue into his mouth, past his front teeth. Like she was tasting him more than really kissing him. They hadn't kissed hardly at all the first time. She tasted faintly like coffee with milk, he decided, and ran his hand up her back, under her shirt. He'd pulled her blouse out of the waistband of her skirt, when she'd climbed into his lap, and he fumbled with the clasp of her bra. So unsuave, he thought.

She pulled back from their kiss and started unbuttoning his shirt. His left shoulder was a little different shape that his right, from where it had been broken.

He wondered when the violence was going to start, though he was plenty aroused without it. He would let her take the lead. He didn't think she'd deliberately seduced him to kill him, though it was a distinct possibility. She seemed to be a bit unhinged by his stunt with her rings.

* * *

_This is must be what madness is like_, she thought as he pulled her shirt off and they lay back on the bed, her entire body stretched on top of his. She was naked from the waist up, and he was unzipping her skirt as quickly as he could. 

She lay perfectly still, almost unable to move. He ran his palms up, over the sides of her waist, his thumbs grazing the outside edges of her breasts where they lay, mashed against his chest. He slid his fingertips down the groove of her spine, raising a shiver where his fingers had just been, and into the open top of her skirt, where he'd unzipped it. He slipped his fingers into the top of her pantyhose- black ones, with the seam up the back- and she shuddered as his first two fingers stroked the impossibly soft skin at the top of the cleft of her buttocks, around where her spine ended.

She whimpered a little and wondered why it was so desperate between them, when the same gesture from any number of other lovers would've earned them her boredom. Somehow she was less confident this time, than she'd been before; before she'd had a purpose, she'd thought. But this. This was just proof of her madness and depravity, she thought.

He rolled them over then, so that he was on top of her, and bent his head to her chest. He hadn't shaved, the stubble on his chin and cheek scraped the tender skin of her breast as he licked the very tip of her nipple where it jutted up from the peak of her tit. He looked her in the eye when he tested the same spot with his front teeth, squeezing it very gently and swirling the tip of his tongue around it.

She closed her eyes; she couldn't stand to meet his gaze or she would just come right there, lying under him, without even getting his pants off.

* * *

He sensed that perhaps he needed to hurry up, when she'd closed her eyes as he was tugging at her nipple with his teeth. He didn't think of himself as a particularly considerate fuck, but it would be a shame to let her pent up desire for him go to waste. 

He rolled away from her for a second and shucked his shirt- it was already unbuttoned, anyway, and as he took off his pants and boxers in one move, she shimmied out of her skirt next to him. Before he could roll back over her, though, she straddled him, taking his stiff cock in the circle between her thumb and her forefinger and stroking him. This time, he was the one to close his eyes from her scorching gaze; she was totally unapologetic, and that made him want her even more.

He placed a hand on her thigh without opening his eyes, and pulled her gently towards his hips with his other hand at her waist.

She didn't hesitate for a second. Holding him still, she slid down onto him, achingly slow, so as not to cause them to come.

He opened one eye and noticed her eyes were closed. She was, in a word, breathtaking. Her ponytail was coming loose, a few long clumps from around her face had already worked their way loose and were hanging over her collarbones and brushing the tops of her breasts. The bite bruises he'd left on her stomach last week were fading to a green-yellow color, and he placed his palm over them to cover them. She placed her long fingers over his without opening her eyes. What was she thinking, behind her closed eyelids? He could see the tiny blue and purple veins around her eyes, so delicate. Her eyes were bruised, between her lower lids and her cheekbones, dark circles under her eyes, like she'd been crying.

Well, she probably had been, he thought, which is kind of indirectly your fault. But he wouldn't take the blame for whatever had happened between her and Vaughn; last week was just a progression of something that had been roiling under the surface of their relationship for a long time, he had decided. Because he certainly hadn't made her do anything she wasn't already intent on doing.

_Schaden ist die schönste Freude_, he thought.

* * *

She couldn't bear to look at him, once he was inside her. She didn't want to see him watching her; she knew he was looking at her, and it made her skin prickle with delight, to be admired. She felt him place his hand over her womb, over the bruises he'd made there last week, and she put her hand over his to keep it there. It was the closest to holding hands like normal people that they had come. 

Without opening her eyes, she grabbed his other hand on her thigh, and moved it around the small of her back. She bent over him then, her forehead on his chest, their hands still on her stomach. She came as he pulled her tight to him with the arm he had around her back, pressing himself into her just a tiny bit more, an imaginary bit since she was already full of his cock.

She opened her mouth like she might cry out, or scream, but no sound came out. She felt her stomach convulse under his hand and he came then too, with a noise that would've been a laugh except it was silent.

She stretched one leg out behind her, feeling her knee pop as she did, and the muscles in her thigh tremble. They stayed like that for a long time, her sitting on him in a half-splits, just breathing.

* * *

Hours later, they lay exhausted under the sheets. Just the sheet, not the comforter. It was too warm for that in room 447. 

Sark snuck a sideways look at her, where she lay on her side facing away from him. There was a big scratch down one side of her back, and little rug burn on the top of her buttocks from where they'd fallen onto the carpet. His own back still stung where she had raked her nails over his middle back, not just a light scrape- he was definitely missing some skin.

The room was a wreck, he noticed, lifting his head a little. After their initial, quietly brutal coupling, they'd come back to themselves and had joined countless more times in rough, bruising foreplay that lead inevitably to rough, bruising intercourse. He had lost count how many times, maybe 7? He smiled to himself.

He'd thought she'd finally fallen asleep, but then she leaned over to the clock radio and turned on some FM station. It was halfway through a song, a slow, spacey piano number.

_Come on, oh my star is fading_

_And I see no chance of release_

_And I know I'm dead on the surface_

_But I am screaming underneath_

She rolled onto her back and he noticed the bruise forming on her cheekbone, under her left eye. He hadn't meant to slap her quite that hard. He hadn't actually slapped her, more like flicked her with his fingers open, when she had bitten his lip hard enough to draw blood.

_And time is on your side_

_It's on your side now_

_Not pushing you down_

_And all around, no_

_It's no cause for concern__ 1_

She rolled onto her right side and they stared at each other. He raised up on his bum shoulder and leaned over her face, pressed his lips to the bruised spot.

"Ow," she said softly, "That's going to be a deep one there."

She rolled his lower lip out with her thumb to see the cut her teeth had made. "Ouch," she giggled, "Sorry about that."

He shrugged. "I would've stopped you if I hadn't liked it."

Her eyes glittered a little with a smile. She was… incorrigible. He suspected, if she hadn't been so eager to get out of his house in England, that it might've come to this.

"Sydney," he said, suddenly quite serious, "Where will you go when you leave here?"

She sighed heavily. She wouldn't meet his eyes. "Sark, I…" her voice trembled with something, maybe it was emotion, he didn't know. "I don't know how to do this."

"What?" he asked. She obviously did know how to do something, which namely was fuck him silly for the last 4 hours.

"I…" she rolled onto her back, "I don't know where Vaughn is. I didn't go to work today. I can't stay here, that's crazy. I don't have your intel, I don't know where my dad is. I don't know if Vaughn's talked to him."

She pulled the sheet up suddenly, covering her beautiful tits. Pity.

"What am I gonna do now," she said, and now her voice really did sound like she might start crying.

"Sydney!" he snapped. "I don't… _need_ you. I don't need you for any of the things that people think they need other people for. I admire you, your skill as an operative. We're obviously compatible physically—" he waved his hand around at the general disarray of room. "But I beg you, don't mistake it for love. I don't need _love_ from you. I know that's not what I'm supposed to say, but it's true."

"No, I know." She agreed in an instant. He was relieved. He wasn't lying, not about this. He loved her way, but not her. Loved the little bits and pieces of her aliases, even the ones she didn't know she used, like The Cheating Wife. There was no single her to him, or for anyone, to love.

"Honestly," he shook his head, "I don't know what that is, to actually love another person. I never have," he admitted. "I suppose if there were anyone I might love, it might be your mother, but aside from Irina, there is no one."

"The only thing I've learned to count on," he concluded, "Is not to count on anything. Or anyone."

She nodded silently, and then he understood what she'd meant in the restaurant, about how some people have those bonds to other people. Like Vaughn. Maybe like Lauren had needed Vaughn. Like Sydney had once needed Danny. But those people were not him. Or her anymore, as far as he could tell.

* * *

Songs: 

1 "Amsterdam." A Rush of Blood to the Head, Coldplay.

German. " _Schaden ist die schönste Freude" means something like, Suffering is the greatest/nicest pleasure.  
_


	20. Chapter 20

Jack could tell, as soon as Vaughn came to work that morning without Sydney by his side, that something was amiss. He'd reluctantly left her at the airport the night before, at her urging, even though Vaughn hadn't come to pick her up as they'd arranged. He'd felt a strange vibe from her after her hour alone with Irina, the entire way back in the plane from Berlin; there were tearstains on her cheeks but she refused to discuss that anything might not be right. He'd finally convinced himself that the stress of seeing Irina—never a dull moment—and of hiding her secret pact with Sark was starting to get to her.

But then this morning, she hadn't come to work. Vaughn had stalked in, glared in the general direction of his corner office, and sat down angrily at his computer terminal.

Jack called Sydney's cell phone five or six times, but finally settled on just leaving a message, "Sydney, it's…" He never called himself 'Dad,' not even to her. "It's your father. Please call me. I'm worried about you."

* * *

Vaughn had left for work with her sitting on the couch, hair wet, in her bathrobe. They didn't speak again after she hadn't answered his question about Sark, about their way with each other, and he couldn't think of what to say, anyway.

Then halfway to work, he called her cell phone but there was no answer. He listened to her voice on the message, "Hi, you've reached Sydney's voicemail; I can't take your call, so please leave your name and number and I'll call you back when I can. Bye."

It didn't sound like the voice of someone who would cheat on you. He dialed it back several more times, hoping she wouldn't answer, so he could hear the message again.

He was in the middle of one such hang-up call when he noticed Jack standing at his elbow.

He slammed the receiver down and stared up at Jack.

They had never been on easy terms with each other. The first attempt Vaughn had made at doing the respectful thing and asking Jack's permission to marry his daughter, Jack had started to turn him down, saying something about how while Vaughn wasn't as useless as he'd previously thought, he wasn't really the kind of man who…

Jack had never gotten to finish that sentence. Someone had stormed into his office and interrupted them. Vaughn wondered to this day what Jack was going to say to him. Of course later he'd revised his judgment, and grudgingly given his blessing to them.

Which, Vaughn thought pissily, might not have been the better outcome in light of this morning's events.

"Come with me," Jack said, and turned on his heel.

Vaughn had no choice but to follow his father-in-law like a whipped dog through the ops room, into the stairwell and up onto the roof of the building. It was literally the most private place they could talk, outside, exposed to the sky.

"Where is Sydney," Jack began, but Vaughn interrupted him.

"No, I'm the one who gets to ask the questions," Vaughn said, one of the few times he'd ever contradicted Jack. "How about you start by telling me why you really went to Berlin?"

"Irina." Jack wasn't going to sugar-coat it.

Vaughn stood, hands on his hips under his suit jacket, and stared at the pebbly concrete near Jack's shoe. Jack had been in on this, somehow, this proved it. To take his wife to meet her mother. It was a sentence which would have sounded so reasonable and innocuous if they had been pretty much any other family besides this one. Her mother, who had been working with Sark. Who he had established, beyond a shadow of doubt, had fucked his wife six ways from Sunday. Make that plural--wives.

"What do you know about this?" Vaughn reached into his jacket pocket and drew out Sark's note. The piece of Scotch tape fluttered in the wind as he handed it to Jack.

* * *

"This is for my shoulder," Jack read out loud. His brow creased into several wrinkles, like he was confused. Vaughn was nearly certain this concern was fake.

"It had Sydney's engagement ring taped to it." Vaughn's voice broke a little when he said her name.

"Sark," Jack said, and the one-syllable moniker hung there, like a balloon waiting to be popped. Vaughn now knew for certain that Jack had known about something, that there was more to her trip to England than just surveillance. Vaughn had decided long ago that Jack was the least normal father he'd ever known; what kind of dad tests government brain-washing experiments on a 6-year-old, under the guise of protecting her from her mother?

"Very good," Vaughn's sarcasm was palpable. "It seems your little girl arranged herself a deal with Mr. Sark while she was away. And by a deal, I mean she agreed to suck his coc—"

The back of Vaughn's tongue never met the roof of his mouth to form the 'k' at the end of the word, because Jack's punch sent him sprawling face-first onto the roof of the building.

"Don't you dare take that tone of voice with me when you talk about Sydney," Jack's voice said, high above his head. He heard Jack pull his suit coat back down. Were her entire family sadists?

Vaughn drew himself onto all fours, then onto his feet. He stood up and looked Jack square in the eye. "Did you know she had an affair with Sark?"

"No." Jack wasn't lying.

"What did you know, then?"

"Only that they made a deal for intel. That he's trying to track down someone, and wanted our files."

Ok, that jived with what she'd told him.

"She said Sark threatened to send you the rings if she didn't deliver," Jack didn't meet Vaughn's eyes, "Which I thought wouldn't be particularly effective."

They stared at each other. "Unless there was already reason for you to mistrust her."

Vaughn looked away, out over the city. The smog wasn't too bad today, all things considered. He'd wanted to move away from LA. Someplace quieter. Cleaner.

"Michael," Jack's use of his first name caused him to turn back, "I had hoped that after all you two had been through, that you would be able to make each other happy. But the heart…" He hesitated, uncertain what to say, "The heart is an unpredictable organ. It doesn't reason well, it doesn't have the temperance of a brain, or a lung that breathes without you telling it to."

"I lost her a long time ago," Vaughn said, his voice breaking Jack's heart a little. "If I ever really had her."

* * *

It actually did cause a pain in Jack's chest, seeing Vaughn so hurt by what Sydney had done. He hadn't known she had… been with Sark. He tried not to think about his daughter, about her predilections, but he couldn't help but hope that Sark had less tolerance for pain and abuse than Sydney did. It made him extremely uncomfortable, thinking about his older daughter at the hands of a man who had no compunctions about torturing his own father, no matter what the circumstances of Lazarey's involvement in Sark's life had been.

He knew exactly what Vaughn was feeling. It was a feeling you hoped you would never have to endure once in a lifetime, let alone twice. Let alone 3 years apart. It had nearly killed him to find out that Irina was, in fact, not American at all, but Russian, and that their marriage had been plotted out in a conference room in Moscow years before he'd ever laid eyes on Irina.

Irina. Had she known about Sydney and Sark? About their deal? What had she said to Sydney, in that hour they spent alone?

Shit. There was so little he knew, even when he knew so much more than Vaughn.


	21. Chapter 21

Sydney slowly pulled her clothes on, her hair dripping from the hotel shower. She heard her cell beep its message tone in her purse—she wondered that she'd remembered her purse when they'd left the restaurant—and she drew it out.

The call log indicated 12 missed calls.

_Press one to hear your new voice mail_, the female automaton instructed her.

"Sydney, it's your father. Please call me. I'm worried about you."

_Delete._

"Hi Syd," Vaughn's voice made her start a little, "I see you didn't come to work, and… I'm worried about you. Maybe your dad knows where you are. Anyway, um… call me. Please."

She listened to it three more times before she pushed her thumbnail on the six key. _Delete_.

Sark was still in the shower. She straightened the room a little, righted the chair they'd knocked over, tried to smooth the sheets back over the bed where they'd kicked them off in their urgency. She was standing up when she caught a glimpse of herself in the large decorative mirror on the wall.

The bruise under her left eye was quite large. Her makeup was all at home, she didn't have any concealer. From his fingers.

She put her wet hair in a loose braid and secured it with the ponytail holder she'd stripped out earlier.

The water in the shower stopped running and she went to the door of the bathroom. It was open.

"Hi," he said, a towel already around his waist. "Are you alright?"

It was such a strange question, coming from him. He was the last person on earth she needed concern or pity from.

"Julian," she felt so strange saying his first name. She'd never called him anything but Sark. Ever. "I still intend to get you the intel on Wells. I just need more time."

He nodded and rubbed some shaving cream on his face. Wordlessly, he began shaving, wincing only when he hit a bump on his cheek and a droplet of blood welled up to surface.

"I just can't go back to work," she said, hopelessly. "I can't face Vaughn like this."

"I fail to see how this is really any different than last week, when you went back to his bed." He looked at her in the mirror. "Don't feel like you shouldn't, if you want to."

She was surprised at him, really and truly. What he'd said about not loving anyone. She knew people always said, don't confuse love with sex, but… it was hard sometimes. She didn't love him. She didn't. Really. Too much polluted water under the proverbial bridge had seen to that. She loved little things about him, though. Like the way his lower lip was a little deformed, like he was always biting part of it in his front teeth. How his feet were. His funny English accent.

"I don't think either of us wants that," she said at last, in Russian. He kept shaving and only his eyes betrayed his amusement. "I can ask my dad to help us. I think he still will."

"If we're going to remain partners," Sark replied, his speech quicker and more fluid than her own, "We're going to have to work on your Russian."

"Your accent is piteous for the child of a native speaker," he chided her gently, back to English. "But then, I suppose she never spoke Russian to you."

It killed her that he had more memories of her mother than she did.

"No."

"_Nyet_, darling," he splashed water on his face and walked over to where she stood in the doorway. He took her hand and placed her finger tips on his lips. "_Nyet_."

* * *

She left the hotel and phoned Jack from inside the safety of her locked car.

"Sydney, where are you?" Her father's voice was strong, full of concern.

"Dad, I'm fine," she assured him. "Listen, can you meet me."

"Vaughn is crazy with worry for you," her dad's voice was slightly accusatory. "Would you please let him know you're alright?"

"Yes, I will," she agreed. "Meet me on the bridge over the freeway by the Museum of Contemporary Art." They had met there before, suspended above the whizzing cars. There was enough background noise that no one could listen in on them from afar.

They hung up and she dialed their home number. Vaughn picked up after one ring.

"Syd," he breathed, not angry. "Where are you?"

"It doesn't matter," she lied, "But I'm alright."

They were silent for a few minutes, just listening to each other be quiet. It reminded her of when he'd run off to track down Lauren—to kill her—after she'd taken off. After Vaughn had broken Sark's shoulder and nose to find out where she'd gone. The eerie silence on his end of the conversation when she'd realized what he was going to do.

"Listen Syd," he said, his voice tired, "If you want to come home, I can go to Weiss's. This is still your house, too."

"Ok," she said, and she could feel the tears welling up in her eyes. She hated herself for hurting him like this. "Maybe I will, later." She had no intention of doing that.

They hung up and she turned up her radio, really loud. A CD had been playing the whole time, but she'd turned the sound off so she could talk to them.

_Thought I'd been through this in 1919 counting the tears of ten thousand men_

Tori. She loved this song.

_And gathered them all, but my feet are slipping _

_There's something we left on the windowsill there's something we left, yes…_

She closed her eyes and rested her head on the seat. She was tired. And not a little sore from the day's activities.

_We'll see how brave you are, we'll see how fast you'll be runnin' _

_We'll see how brave you are, yes Anastasia_

She began singing along, horribly out of tune, but she didn't care.

_Thought she deserved no less than she'd give_

_Well, Happy Birthday—her blood's on my hands_

_It's kind of a shame, cuz I did like that dress_

_It's funny, the things that you find in the rain, the things that you find_

She was beyond shame at this point. She didn't care how bad it sounded.

_In the mall _

_In the date-mines_

_In the knot still in her hair_

_On the bus I'm on my way down__ 1_

By the time Tori hit that prolonged high note on "see" in the second round of the chorus, Sydney had sung out whatever sullenness had been lurking after her since she left the hotel.

She was done feeling bad, she decided. She had no regret about what she'd done.

* * *

Jack strolled onto the bridge, waiting for Sydney to show. He might as well have been a lonely older businessman talking a walk at night from his hotel.

She must be nearby, to have requested they meet there. It wasn't anywhere near the office, or their houses.

They didn't know where she'd taken off to that morning, but both he and Vaughn were worried sick over her for different reasons. He knew Vaughn was circling around and around her infidelity, whereas he was trying to figure out Sark's endgame, and what it had to do with his daughter.

He heard her heels behind him on the concrete of the bridge.

"Dad," her voice, strong above the sound of the wind being pushed around by the cars below them.

He turned. Her hair was loose, damp, and there was a bruise purpling on her left cheekbone.

"Sweetheart," he rushed forward and hugged her to him. "What—" he touched her face where the mark was—"Is this from Vaughn?" Suddenly he didn't feel so bad for punching his son-in-law earlier that afternoon.

"No, no," she shook her head and grimaced a little. "Michael didn't do that to me—you know he would never touch me."

There was a weird moment between them. It hung in the air, begging to be questioned.

"You've been with Sark, haven't you," Jack said, knowing the answer already.

She nodded and wouldn't meet his eyes. "Dad, I need your help. I still need to deliver the intel Sark asked me for."

"Wells." Jack could hardly believe he was hearing this from her.

"Right," she confirmed. "If Sark can find him…" She stopped.

"Then what, Sydney," Jack said. "Sweetheart, where do you expect this to go? Someone like Sark, you can't make a life with him."

She pursed her lips, but didn't say anything.

"I can't pretend to understand, what goes on between you, or between you and Vaughn," he sighed. "But… just think about the consequences of this. Of what you've set in motion. Where will you go when this is over?"

"Yeah," she said, so softly that he could barely hear her. "I dunno."

* * *

Songs: 

1 "Yes, Anastasia." Under the Pink, Tori Amos.


	22. Chapter 22

Irina was on a hunt of her own. She needed to find Anastasia before Sark did. She wasn't convinced that her friend was dead. Anastasia had disappeared several years after Irina had taken custody of her son, presumably to escape from Lazarey, but she didn't know where, or with whom, or why.

Wells was a classmate of Sark's at boarding school. A rival. Someone at odds with Sark for some reason—what was that? She knew Sark had been a royal—she chuckled at the thought—pain in the ass to his classmates. She'd seen his progress reports. They were invariably the same.

_Exemplary pupil. High aptitude but poor attitude. Harbors suspicion and hostility towards peers. Flagrant disregard for authority of teaching staff._

Yes, that was her Julian. He had a lot of his mother in him.

Back to Wells. Who was he working for? If he had killed Anastasia, why? For whom? What good would it do someone like Wells to hunt down a man he'd known 12 years earlier, and kill that man's mother, a woman Sark had barely known?

It had to be fake, the picture Sark had been sent. It was so like Anastasia, the high melodrama of it. Woman strangled to death by a lover; rough play that had gotten out of hand.

Irina tried not to think about Julian with Sydney. She was angry, disappointed at him. He knew she wouldn't approve of his actions, why even tell her? But she was more disappointed in Sydney; her daughter was making the same mistakes she had made. The affair. The secrets. The peculiar penchant for violence. She almost blamed herself for not staying in the US, with Jack, instead running away as it was her duty at the KGB. None of this would've happened.

She picked up the phone in the booth on the corner of the street she'd been walking along, and dialed her contact.

* * *

Sark lay on the bed for a long time after Sydney had left him. He dozed until the sun went down. The sting from her nails on his back was beginning to subside. 

He almost hoped she would go back to Vaughn, with the bruise on her face, the scrape on her back. He got a cruel, evil pleasure out of causing Vaughn to suffer, he wasn't even sure why. _Schadenfreude_, the word danced in the back of his mind. It wasn't really sadism, literally; it was more like that good feeling you got when something bad happened to someone, and you knew it was going to happen. Like an "I told you so" type of sensation.

He rolled over and picked up his book where it lay on the end table.

"_What do you hate most?" he asks. _

"_A lie. And you?" _

"_Ownership," he says. "When you leave me, forget me." _

_Her fist swings towards him and hits hard into the bone just below his eye. She dresses and leaves. _

He wanted to spy on her. He didn't know where she'd gone, though. Maybe he'd go by their house anyway. Check up on Vaughn.

* * *

Outside their house, Sark crouched behind a rhododendron bush. This was really not his specialty, this kind of stalker behavior. He considered these tactics to be the province of a desperate man. And he was anything but desperate. 

The lights were on and the windows open. He could hear the TV, but couldn't tell what Vaughn was watching. She wasn't there, unsurprisingly. Her car was still missing from the garage.

Cautiously, he straightened up and peered over the ledge of the window. It was their kitchen. Spanish tile countertops, light hanging over the kitchen table. There were bananas in a bowl on the counter, brown and black splotches forming on their hides. He hated bananas, he thought, and tried not to make a face at the very notion of them.

He went low again and slid along to the next window. Bingo. Living room, complete with Agent Vaughn. God, he looked terrible, Sark smirked. Schadenfreude!

Vaughn was sprawled on the couch, in jeans and a Detroit Red Wings shirt. He hadn't shaved. His hair was a mess. Pathetic.

Sark took in the room; it was an amalgam of items he supposed had been Vaughn's, and ones that she had added after she'd come back from the dead. All her things had been destroyed in the fire the Covenant had set after her fight with Allison in the apartment. There was a good sized bookshelf full of books; were they hers? Vaughn didn't strike Sark as the reading type. Franklin's intel on Vaughn had been a waste of funds—not that he was that expensive. Vaughn just didn't do anything interesting; there were no lunchtime visits to titty bars, no call girls while Sydney was out of town, no gambling. He was… what he was. A good guy. _Steady_, Sark's mind seized on the word, having read it in a Cosmo magazine left behind by some Valley Girl on his flight from England to LA, the kind that some women spend their whole lives looking for. The kind of guy who doesn't have any bad habits that need forgiving or fixing.

Pretty much everything he himself was not, Sark decided.

Just then, a set of headlights swept the yard and Sark dropped to all fours. Was it her coming home?

There was a muted _whump_ of a car door closing inside the garage. So it was her. He heard her enter the house, and the TV went silent. It was nearly killing him not to look, but he refused to act on the urge. Give them a chance to work out whatever it was she had come home for.

But then, to his surprise, he heard the door open and Vaughn said, "You know where I'll be. Call if you need anything."

What was this development? Was Vaughn really leaving her alone in the house?

Sure enough, he heard the garage door open, Vaughn's car back down the driveway, and purr off down the street. Sweet, sweet stupidity, Sark smiled. Leaving your wife alone.

* * *

Inside the house, Sydney went straight to the bathroom. She wanted to brush her teeth, they felt like they had… fur. 

She was busy making three rotations of the bristles around each of her molars—especially the ones that had been damaged when Suit & Glasses had tortured her, they were prone to decay, the dentist had said--when she glanced up in the mirror. Sark was behind her in the doorway.

She screamed then, spitting a giant blob of toothpaste foam onto the front of her shirt. "What are you doing here?" she shouted, the strongest her voice had been all day.

He shrugged and smiled. "Checking up on you."

"Well…" She couldn't believe he'd come here, into her house. This was breaking and entering. She felt more violated by this than anything he'd done to her in his hotel room. "How'd you get in?"

"Through the door, Sydney," he said, bored. "I wasn't beamed up or anything sexy like that."

"Fuck off," she spit her toothpaste into the sink and rinsed her mouth. "I went by your hotel but you weren't there. How did you know I'd be here?"

"Because," he said, his voice unexpectedly vicious, "You always go back to him."

"Vaughn's not here, in case your super-spy skills hadn't picked up on that," she said bitterly. "He went to Weiss's."

She pushed past him into the master bedroom, where she went into the closet and started pulling out clothes. "I only came back to get my clothes, I can't stay here."

"He's kicked you out, has he?" Sark perched on the edge of the bed—their bed—and looked amused. Damn him. "How predictable of him."

"You! You…" she spluttered, not even knowing what to say. "You can't leave well enough alone. I'm working on getting you what you need."

"Fine."

"Good."

She tossed several pairs of shoes out onto the floor, practical shoes, not heels. She didn't suspect she'd need the dress-up clothes, wherever she were going.

"Oh, Sydney," his voice had a trace of disappointment in it, "I do wish you'd bring those heels, the ones with all the straps. I've rather looked forward to seeing you in them." _And nothing else_ was implied, she decided.

She glanced out of the closet at him. He wanted her to come over to him. She stuck her chin out so that her lower teeth jutted out past her top ones.

"Sark," she said quietly, "Stop it."

"I don't think either of us wants that," he echoed her comment from earlier in the afternoon.

Oh, stupid body, stupid girl body, she cursed herself as she felt delicious prickly heat between her legs at the thought of his body against hers.

He got up off the bed and came into the closet with her. The last thing she saw, before he pulled the string on the light switch and extinguished it, was a pair of Vaughn's dress shoes.

* * *

It was stuffy and dark in the closet, but it smelled like her, like her clothes and her perfume. After they'd kissed for what seemed like hours, he reached under her skirt and jerked down her underwear. She gasped a little when he traced his forefinger back and forth against her. He held her around her waist, close to him, and when she tried to arch back, away from his touch, he shoved his two middle fingers as deep into her as he could. 

"_What do you hate most?" he asks. _

"_A lie. And you?" _

"_Ownership," he says._

He had strong hands, but he was trying to be gentle. He knew she was probably sore. Hell, he was sore. He backed her up against the back wall of the closet, his hand insistent between her legs. Her skirt was hiked up around her waist, her panties around one ankle. He wasn't actually that aroused—yet—but he was enjoying watching her. He pressed his thumb against her clit and she moaned against his lips as he made a 'come here' type gesture with his fingers, inside her. Now that he had her, he put his other hand under her shirt, squeezing her nipple between his thumb and his forefinger.

"Sark," she breathed, her head back against the wall and her eyes closed, "We have to stop this."

"Why," he muttered, tugging at her earlobe with his teeth, "Give me one good reason."

"Mmpf…"

"I'm sorry, what?" he whispered.

"Don't stop."

"That's what I thought."

* * *

For those celebrating, HAPPY THANKSGIVING:) 


	23. Chapter 23

They lay amongst her clothes on the bed, a pair of jeans near the pillows and a cardigan hanging off the foot of the bed.

_I am going crazy_, she thought. Absofuckinglutely crazy.

"Sydney, did you know," Sark's eyes were closed where he lay next to her, his shirt unbuttoned and his slacks half off, "That 'fuck' is the only infix in English?"

She did actually know that. "Um, yeah? What has that got to do with… anything?"

"It's just funny," he laughed out loud. "Of all the words that you could stick in the middle of another word, you know?"

"Grow up," she rolled her eyes. Where were her pants? Where were her underwear? Where had she left her goddamn mind?

"Oh, c'mon," he smiled, "I know you're not really this uptight."

She just stared at him, but she could feel a smile beginning to tweak the muscles in her cheeks. Her lips did this funny quivering thing, when she was trying to keep from laughing.

"Oh, oh—" he sat up and peered at her, like he was trying to figure her out, "Is that… a _smile_ I see? Is it possible? Agent Sydney is not immune to laughter?"

She did laugh then, a little. Then a lot. Oh my god, were they having… a moment? She thought this would be a moment-free ordeal.

"Good GOD!" he exclaimed, "That was harder than making you come!"

Oh. Not fair. She turned on him then, tickling him mercilessly. As they play-fought and wrestled amongst the clothes and the wreckage of her marriage bed, she was curiously aware of the weight of her own body; she had observed, it was like you were weightless, until you touched another person. Only then did you notice how heavy a body can be, when it's not carrying itself around under its own volition.

"Sark, stop it!" she shrieked as he tickled her under her arms. "I mean it, AUUUUGH!"

As abruptly as they began, he stopped when she asked. They lay on their sides, looking at each other, still giggling a little.

She raised up on one elbow and leaned over his face. Gently, so gently, she brushed her lips against his and felt the goose bumps between her shoulder blades. For once, she didn't want to be rough, and it was so… _hot_. _Damn_, she thought as she felt his tongue slide against hers, _this is the most normal kiss I've given anyone in years_.

* * *

Jack went directly to the office after his meet with Sydney. He needed the Wells file, and pronto. He wanted an end to this game Sark was playing, and fast.

As a senior operative who ran a string of junior operatives, Jack had clearance above and beyond what most of his own agents did. It came in handy, now and then. Now was one of those times.

He went into his office and sat down at the computer. Login ID: bristowjd. Password: L-a-u-r-a.

He didn't know why he hadn't bothered to change his password from Irina's alias, after all these years. It seemed so obvious, but… Jack was perhaps a bit of a masochist.

The analyst database was a labyrinthine system, one it took most new analysts out of college the better part of a year to get a handle on searching. This was partly due to the massive amount of data stored in the warehouse, but also to the ineptitude of the CIA at designing proprietary database software. He often wondered how the CIA managed to stay ahead of most of its targets, when their information store looked like something built on MS Access by a 2nd year IT student.

Jack queried Wells' name. Bingo.

Daniel Asher Wells. Born 1978, Leeds, UK. Educated at Penbroke Boarding and Preparatory School for Boys, County Devonshire. His name was on a list of boys who were subjected, as 6 and 7 year olds, to the agent training that was administered as a part of a government-funded research project. The UK version of Project Christmas. Another name on the list? Julian Alexsandr Sark.

Jack shook off guilt about what his work had lead to—this, indirectly—and kept researching.

Graduated, 1997. Known operative of the Alliance at 18.

So, Mr. Wells had also found himself a place as a lapdog in the same organization as Sloane, Jack noted.

Wells taken into MI6 custody after raid conducted on Cell SD-4; he had been incarcerated briefly following the worldwide fall of the Alliance.

Released from MI-6 custody in 2001. Freelancer. Specializations included wet work, intel acquisition involving torture, languages, chemistry.

Recently, Wells had been spotted in Italy, Hungary, Romania—wait, Romania. Bucharest. That was where Lazarey had lived with Anastasia when Sark had been born.

What was Mr. Wells up to in Bucharest?

Jack sped-read the file, then clicked on the folder containing scans of surveillance photos.

Wells was youngish, with brown curly hair and a smattering of freckles. Maybe 6'2", a little husky. 170 pounds plus, Jack decided.

Most of the photos showed nothing—nothing interesting to Jack, anyway.

They had put a trace on Wells' cell phone. Jack printed the list of numbers dialed, inbound and outbound.

Of course, this being a cell phone, the incoming calls didn't list the number that the call was coming from, only the time and the duration.

He stashed it in the folder he was compiling for Sark to go through later. Let him pour over the records; Jack had a headache and didn't feel like going blind.

He printed a few more records before shutting down his computer and heading out.

* * *

They were still lying on the bed when her cell phone started ringing in the other room.

"Shit," Sydney said, jumping up off the bed. She pulled a man's dress shirt out of the pile on the floor and wrapped it around her as she pattered into the living room where her purse lay.

"This is Bristow," she said in a rush, flipping the phone open.

"Sydney, it's me," Jack's voice crackled with a touch of static. "I've got the intel on Wells."

"Oh, Dad," she felt relief begin to flush over her. "Where are you?"

"I'm at the end of your street, I assumed you went home to get some clothes."

_Oh. Shit._

"Uhh, Dad, I can come get the file from you," she said, running into the bedroom and motioning wildly at Sark, who didn't seem to be moving with nearly the kind of rapidity that she wanted him to. "You didn't have to come all this way."

Sark looked at her with an amused smile flickering across his lip, but he did start buttoning up his shirt.

"Nevermind," Jack said, "I'm already here."

_Beep._

"Get dressed!" she ordered Sark, who was still half naked on the bed.

"Am I about to meet my death, then?" Sark didn't look worried at all. "Was that Vaughn?"

"No!" she shrieked, even more worried than if it had been Vaughn, "It's my dad, get your pants on."

_Doorbell._

She pulled on some sweatpants and ran to the door.

"Hi!" she said, a little too brightly, and smiled a giant smile at Jack.

"Hello," Jack peered around her and she leaned in the direction he was looking. "Is this… a bad time?"

"A what? No, no! Of course not," she stammered. "Come right on in."

She stepped aside then so that Jack could enter the foyer.

She was aware of how she looked. Her cheeks were flushed, even where her cheek was bruised, hair disheveled, she was wearing a man's button-down and a pair of faded blue sweatpants that said UCLA down one leg and Bruins down the other. No shoes. She stank of sex, she was sure of it.

Jack took her in and walked silently into the kitchen. He threw the intel on the kitchen table with a _splat_.

Just then, there was a dull thump from the bedroom.

"Is… Vaughn home?" Jack asked, already knowing the answer. "I didn't see his car in the garage."

"Yeah," Sydney said.

"'Yeah,' Vaughn is here, or 'Yeah' his car is gone?" Jack glowered at her and she could feel her cheeks turn an even deeper shade of scarlet.

_Is Sark here_? Jack mouthed. Her silence made him roll his eyes.

"Sark," her father raised his voice, "Why don't you come out here?"

She wanted to throw up, or maybe run away—or maybe both. This was possibly more embarrassing than when the CIA had found the bug in the VCR and everyone in the office saw her and Vaughn fucking each other's brains out.

Sark emerged from the hallway—he wasn't walking, he was strolling. Hands in pockets, shirt untucked, and barefoot. His calmness infuriated her beyond comprehension; how could he be so nonchalant about facing _her_ father, in… _their_ house. She was disgusted with herself for letting him stay and take liberties with her, and at him for presuming he could.

He and Jack stood, staring at each other, for what seemed like an eternity.

"Jack," Sark said at last, tipping his chin defiantly up at her father, "Good to see you again."

"Sark," Jack replied, his voice low, "I wish I could return the sentiment."

They both glanced at Sydney.

"Sweetheart," her father said, "Can you give us a minute?"

"Um…" She wasn't sure they wouldn't kill each other. "Ok?" She slipped on her running shoes and went outside. She shivered in the night air as she sank down in one of the deckchairs on their back patio. She liked these chairs.


	24. Chapter 24

"Sit down," Jack commanded, and pulled out a kitchen chair for Sark.

"I'd be delighted," Sark got even cockier when he knew his own suffering was a likely outcome of a situation.

He slid into the seat and Jack sat across from him, his hand on the file where it lay on the tile-topped table.

They stared at each other some more. Jack just glowered at Sark, and Sark kept his amused-bored smirk firmly in place. It was his armor. His "see-if-I-give-a-shit" face.

"Sydney," Jack said at last, "Is not a pawn for you to use in your… operation."

Sark said nothing.

"I can't pretend to understand what your motivations are, for double-crossing her on your bargain," Jack spoke quite slowly, as if Sark were perhaps slightly retarded, "Or for seducing her in the first place. Sometimes I wonder if I made the right decision," he continued, "Keeping you alive for all those months. When we could've killed you, like that—" Jack snapped his fingers.

"I suppose I never thanked you for that," Sark said, ungraciously.

"It's not your turn to speak."

Sark sensed Jack might be ready to deliver on his execution threat at this point, and stayed quiet.

"Now," Jack said, "You can have the intel you wanted on Daniel Wells. It's right here," Jack lifted the folder off the table a bit. "On one condition."

Sark merely raised his eyebrows. What did Jack possibly have to bargain, he'd already wrecked everything between Sydney and Vaughn. Not that it hadn't been a wreck already.

"Obviously we can't undo what's already done," Jack continued. "But I want you to walk away from her. She's been through too much for this."

So Jack WAS going to play the Stay-Away-From-Sydney card. What a load of bullocks.

"I think you're forgetting, Jack," he said, calmly. "She is a grown-up, and can do as she pleases."

"You have no… _respect_… for anything, do you?" Jack's voice was low, but fairly trembled with disbelief. "You are just like Irina in that regard. She did a good job raising one of you."

Sark shrugged. "You can blame it on whomever you'd like, Jack, but you know Sydney can take care of herself."

Jack glared at him. It fueled him, seeing Jack so angry, so disapproving. Almost the same as when Irina had disapproved of his methods.

"I'm sure she didn't tell you that she was, in fact, the one who seduced me," Sark smiled, "Not the other way around. She dealt the first blow, no pun intended."

Jack stood suddenly, and Sark's insides got a little weak. "The last man who attempted to discuss his relations with my daughter with me no longer walks this earth," Jack's voice was nearly a whisper. "Unless you'd like to join him, I suggest you shut it."

So, Simon Walker had been blabbing to Jack. Which was probably why Sark hadn't talked to Walker any time in the last two-and-a-half years.

"Where do you intend for this to lead," Jack asked, motioning with his hand at the house, at Sark, out at the back patio in general, "You don't love her."

"Yes, you're right about that," Sark agreed readily. "Which is why she keeps coming back."

"I'm afraid you've lost me with your dime-store philosophizing," Jack mocked him. "It has everything to do with it. That she loves Vaughn, and he loves her. And you're wrecking it, without anything to give her in return," Jack's lower lip turned out in disgust, "And that is not how partners do business."

"You're right—she doesn't love me," Sark said, "But you're wrong about him loving _her_—there is no her to love, Jack."

"Vaughn loves the idea of her, of having someone, a wife, something he possesses," Sark stumbled on the conclusion as it was flowing out of his very mouth. "But Sydney doesn't need that."

They stared at each other.

"Maybe," Sark suggested, cruelly, "You ought to ask her what she has in mind. I'm sure you know trying to read a woman's mind is an exercise in futility."

"She doesn't always know what's best for her, "Jack was utterly convinced of the correctness of this claim.

"Oh, God!" Sark laughed, "How old is she? 33? What, do you and Vaughn have a roadmap drawn out for the two of them? This is the most ridiculous conversation I've had in ages, Jack," his eyes sparkled with amusement, "Spare me."

"I can see that reasoning with you is useless," Jack said, "But remember—pride goes before the fall. And you'd do well to watch your foolish pride in yourself."

* * *

Sydney shivered in the cold, her knees drawn up to her chest on the wooden deck chair. What the hell were they doing in there? She decided until she heard gunshots, she wouldn't try to intercede.

A light breeze blew through the yard and goose bumps popped up on her forearms. This shirt really wasn't that heavy, especially considering she wasn't wearing any underwear.

_Where will you go when this is over_? Jack had asked her, on the bridge.

She didn't know. She wasn't ashamed of what she'd done, not particularly. The fact that she wasn't upset didn't disturb her, either. She felt… free.

Maybe she would get a place of her own, somewhere. She could go into the WPP, and just… start over. Stop being Sydney Anne Bristow and start being someone else for a change. She hadn't actually done anything worthy of prosecution. As usual, Jack's intervention had prevented her from hacking the CIA database above her clearance level and actively stealing information. By using his senior status, he'd garnered the information Sark wanted without involving her or anyone else at the Agency. They couldn't prosecute her for being an unfaithful wife and for having an affair with someone who hadn't really done any noteworthy criminal activity in 3 years.

"Sydney," her father slid open the patio door behind her, "Please come back in."

* * *

Vaughn and Weiss lay, side by side on Weiss's leather couch, staring into space. The TV was on, but the sound was muted.

They had been sitting this way for nearly an hour.

"Dude," Weiss said, finally breaking the interminable silence, "I cannot believe that shit."

"I know."

"I mean… Sark?" Weiss made a face like he was smelling some three-week-old leftover ribs in the back of his fridge. "I don't get it, what power does that guy have with women?"

"Yeah, me neither," Vaughn sighed and closed his eyes. "I didn't see this turning out this way."

Weiss stayed quiet. He was waiting for Vaughn to keep going.

"I… I dunno," Vaughn shrugged. "Maybe it's true, what they say—that girls like bad guys."

"Well, Lauren was a bad girl anyway, so I don't think that one counts," Weiss offered.

"Yeah."

"Yeah."

"But Sydney's not… like that," Vaughn said.

"Mike, I gotta ask you," Weiss said, sitting up quickly, "And don't get all freaked out, because you know we're cool—you and I—"

"Eric, what? Just spit it out," Vaughn said.

"Yeah," Weiss nodded, "Ok, what if it's not Sark's fault? I mean, you weren't there? What if she was the one who—"

"Weiss, shut up."

"Ok, you know I'm just saying, maybe it's not what you think at all."

"I understand what you're saying, and I don't want to hear it," Vaughn grew slightly irritated, "It's Sark's fault, ok? Let's drop it already."

"Ok."

"Fine."


	25. Chapter 25

"Sydney," Jack said as she slipped in and shut the door behind her, "You have the intel you need. I should be going."

"Oh," she said, a little confused. "Um, so you're leaving now?"

"Yes," he said, and he hugged her to him suddenly, quite hard, so hard her breath almost squeezed out of her. "I'll see you."

She caught a glimpse of Sark, seated at her kitchen table already pouring over the file, over Jack's shoulder. He seemed oblivious to the weird moment that was happening just a few feet from where he was sitting.

They walked slowly to the door and as he opened the door, Jack turned back to her and said, "Sydney, be careful. And know, no matter what, that I love you."

"I know, Dad," she whispered, her voice trembling with the near-certain tears, "You too." He told her so rarely that he loved her.

Jack leaned over and kissed her cheek before walking out to his car.

She closed the door behind her and leaned on the doorknob. She refused to blink her eyes, even though they burned with unshed tears, until those tears dissipated. Sark didn't even look up.

"What did you say to each other," she asked, without moving. She was suddenly tired, so tired.

"Nothing important," Sark replied, seeming bored.

"You were in here for 10 minutes," she shot back, "That's a lot of 'nothing important.'"

"Sydney, please," he said, without even looking up, "Leave it alone."

She couldn't believe how dismissive he was being. That he wouldn't even answer her question after he'd been talking to her father about her, alone, while she sat shivering outside in the cold. She hated him right now, in this moment. Everything that had passed between them not even a half an hour ago might as well have never happened.

She walked past the kitchen to their bedroom and slammed the door behind her, locking it. She threw herself face down on their bed, and let the hot, scratchy tears roll out of her eyes.

After twenty solid minutes of Sark-loathing and self-pity, there was a quiet knock at the door. "Hey," Sark's voice came, muffled by the wood, "How about you open the door?"

"How about you fuck off and die?" she cried, her face against the comforter.

"Fine, then."

She heard his footsteps receding down the hallway.

She lay still, so still she could hear the beating of her own heart against the comforter. Finally the sobs that were wracking her torso subsided, and she rolled over onto her back. When she really got to crying like this, she usually held her breath for an interminably long time, minutes it seemed, until she was sure she could breathe without a sob cutting her off in the middle. It was like her diaphragm had gone on strike against normal breathing.

She still hated Sark, she decided. How dare be treat her like that, like she was… _a child_? It was so insulting.

Then again, that was kind of their dynamic. Mutual antagonism—it was her repertoire with him.

_I'm a man of my word, Sydney. _Those had been his words as he'd slipped away from them and disappeared three years earlier. A man of his word my ass, Sydney thought.

She rolled off the bed and went to the door. She started when she opened it and found Sark, standing in the hallway, leaning against the opposite wall.

"I thought you'd come out eventually," he said, "You can't seem to stay away from me today."

She longed to slap him, punish him for his sarcasm, but she knew the likeliest outcome of that scenario.

"Sydney, don't pout," he tried, "I need your help. I can't do this by myself—I need you to come with me."

She just stared at him, leaning against her wall, as if none of the weirdness of the last 12 hours had even happened.

"You don't need me," she clarified, for herself more than him, "You _want_ me to come with you."

"However you choose to look at it," he shrugged, but she could see that whatever plan his mind was forming depended on her coming along.

"So we're settled, then," he said. "You're coming with me to Bucharest."

* * *

They flew together on Aliltalia, using aliases, but sitting next to each other like a couple of honeymooners.

Sydney kept her engagement ring firmly on her finger. At this point it could be part of her disguise, she decided. She didn't ask Sark where her wedding band was. It seemed moot at this point.

"Argh," Sark huffed suddenly, shoving the papers away from him on the tray table and resting his head against the headrest. "What is he up to?"

They had been pouring over the intel for hours. Still, they hadn't been able to piece together a plausible reason for Wells' actions.

She picked up the phone records again, the ones she had gone over ten times already, it seemed like. _Who are you? Who knows you?_ She wondered as she looked at the in- and outbound calls. Wasn't the sum of your persona who you knew, and who knew about you? Bits and pieces gathered up to create a… "somebody" instead of just a void.

She started making a chart of the incoming calls to Wells' phone. Time—Duration—Date—she titled the columns on her notepad.

"You're right handed," Sark observed.

"Yes?" she wasn't sure why he chose to point it out. "And you're left-handed, so what?"

He shook his head. "I just now noticed, that's all."

She continued charting the calls without comment. There was that weird sensation again, that she'd had the night before when he'd made her laugh. Like they were having a moment. He had gone back to his hotel without her, after she'd agreed to come with him. She had slept in her clothes, on top of the covers on their bed. Vaughn hadn't come home from Eric's.

"Wait, she said, "Look at this." She pointed to the time and duration of several incoming calls. "Wells received a 1 minute phone call every other Thursday afternoon at 3:47."

"His contact protocol," Sark supplied. "So we need to find out who is contacting him and where they meet—that will likely lead us to his employer."

"Exactly," she breathed, feeling the rush of satisfaction that this kind of detective work always gave her.

"I can't stand that I didn't notice that," Sark griped, but he was smiling. And then, while she was still looking down at the page in front of her, he leaned over and kissed her cheekbone on her bruise.

"Sark," she whispered, "Stop it, we're on a plane."

"I'm just trying to play my part," he whispered, his face near her ear, "How about you play along?"

An old man across the aisle from him opened one eye from his sleep and smiled at them. Sydney wasn't sure, since Sark's face was in the way, but she thought she saw him wink at her when Sark put his right hand on the inside of her thigh.

She leaned her head against the window frame and stared out at the clouds below them. His hand was making her crazy. She closed her eyes and tried not to think about his hands on her, tried not to imagine the two of them together in her closet. _No, no!_ She squeezed her eyes shut—even trying not to think it was making her replay it in her mind.

They had hours until they were due to land. Sydney kept her eyes closed and pretended to sleep.

* * *

Jack sat in his car in the parking garage, and messaged Irina.

"How r u?" came her reply after some time.

"Need yr help", he typed in shorthand.

With?

Trying 2 find Wells.

I figured.

Jack waited, not sure what to type next. Then Irina's note:

I don't think Anastasia is dead.

? he fired back.

A. disappeared, but I don't know where.

Where r u?

Bucharest.

Jack nodded. It made sense that she would return to the last place she had known Anastasia to live, to try to find out where she'd gone after Sark had been taken from her.

S&V? came her question.

Sark dbl-xx-ed S., he explained.

I knew it. He could hear Irina's voice, see her shaking her head slowly in her mind.

Is S. OK?

? he typed. S. is w/ Sark. WITH SARK, he typed for emphasis.

_I had hoped she wouldn't make the same mistakes as me, Jack_, Irina's reply startled him in its completeness. _But she has to choose for herself_.

I know, he replied, and logged off.

* * *

On the plane, somewhere over continental Europe, Sark had removed his hand from Sydney's leg. They sat in silence for a long while before she had gone into her bag to get her iPod.

He held out his palm wordlessly, the universal gesture for "May I see that?"

She had a mini, not a full sized-Pod, and he scrolled through the playlists without comment. Hm, she liked Tori Amos, it appeared, Elton John, Rufus Wainwright. Her iPod was a veritable tribute to piano rockers.

"Well?" her voice issued a challenge. "Go ahead and say you hate my taste in music."

He merely shrugged. "I don't really listen to music for that reason… I just use it to pick up different accents."

She stared at him without comment.

"You can listen to it if you'd like," she said. "I guess I don't mind my headphones being in your ears."

He went along with her request and tamped the tiny white-corded headphones into his ears. He was amazed how much more comfortable the Apple headphones were than any other ear bud headphones he'd ever had. He was also amused how eclectic people's iPods were. It was like they were reflections of the schizophrenia within each of them.

Psychology through technology, he smiled.

"What?" he could see her mouth the word, but he was already deep into listening to a song.

_My heart is like the ocean  
It gets in the way  
So close to touching freedom  
Then I hear the guards call my name_

And my priest says, "You ain't savin' no souls"  
My father says, "You ain't making any money"  
My doctor says, "You just took it to the limit"  
And here I stand, with this sword in my hand

_You can say it one more time—what you don't like  
Let me hear it one more time, then—have a seat  
While I take to the sky  
_

He pulled the headphones out and handed them back to her, motioning them to put them in her own ears. She looked at the headphones suspiciously, as though they might suddenly become hissing snakes and bite her hands, but she obeyed.

He knew the next lyric to the song.

_If you don't like me just a little, well—  
Why do you hang around?  
If you don't like me just a little, well—  
Why do you hang around?  
If you don't like me just a little, well—  
Why do you take it, take it, take it, take it?__1_

He smiled at her as she glowered at him as he stood to go to the bathroom.

* * *

Songs: 

1 "Take to the Sky." Winter Single (US- 1991), Tori Amos.


	26. Chapter 26

Bucharest's Otopeni airport was small, maybe 12 gates. They had changed planes in Vienna, and the difference between that city and this one, between Western Europe and the former Soviet bloc, was still palpable. People here were skinnier, leaner around the hips. The women were all kind of bitchy looking, he decided.

As they strode through the terminal to baggage, he watched her without actually looking at her, in his peripheral vision. She was already working, starting to put on her alias.

He was beginning to enjoy having her along as a partner, he decided. He rarely worked with anyone. It was his good luck to work with someone who was as skilled as she was. Such a pity she had to be so moralistic and go over to the CIA. He knew she ignored it, the irritating incompetence of her employer and fellow CIA agents, but he figured it was only a matter of time until it got her killed.

They had a current address for Wells in the capital city, and made their way to a nearby hotel. Sark negotiated the rooms with the clerk; his Russian was more passable than hers, and he didn't want them to be suspected as anything else besides a couple on vacation in a nearby country.

He asked the clerk for a room with two beds, but that wasn't going to be possible, the little man informed him.

"Not even for an extra fee?" Sark hinted at a bribe.

"I'm sorry," the man said without an iota of regret, "But I think you can make this work." He looked pointedly at Sydney's ass where she was leaning over their luggage.

Sark was slightly disgusted; since when could one not buy someone off in eastern Europe? Whatever.

They got in the elevator without touching, and wound their way through the maze of hallways. It was obvious the building had been built haphazardly, a series of additions that didn't exactly add up.

Eventually they found room 147 and Sark had to try the key several times before the door opened.

The room was as small as a closet. There was barely room around the edge of the full bed for them to squeeze around it. The bathroom was so small you had to stand next to the toilet to shut the door so you could sit down.

_Thank god men can go standing up_, Sark thought. The maid appeared to have ignored the toilet for the last several cleanings.

She took in the room without comment. When she finally spoke, she said, "I wonder if the TV works."

"I don't think that's the reason we're here," he said, obviously. "Unless you planned to catch up on your Russian rap music videos?"

He sank down on the edge of the bed and sighed. "Alright," he said, "If we get out of this, I promise I will make this up to you."

She studied him curiously. "That's going to have to be one expensive hotel to make up for this deathtrap."

He nodded. He was sleepy. "We should take a nap—Wells is a night owl."

She tossed her purse onto the credenza next to the TV and flopped on the bed beside him. The springs were so squishy it was like lying on a bed of curly nails covered with lumpy cotton balls.

He lay back, not touching her, before turning away from her on his side. Maybe he wouldn't be able to feel the springs quite so prominently, if he exposed less surface area of his body to them.

* * *

When they awoke, it was pitch black in their room.

And was he… spooning her? She lay very still, almost not breathing, trying to tell if he was awake or not. He was taller enough than she that she fit neatly into the curve of his body. If spooning were acceptable, that is. Which it wasn't.

"Sark," her voice was sharp and seemed unusually loud in the quiet of the room, the hotel.

"What?" he started, automatically reaching for the gun that wasn't in his holster. "What, what is it?"

"Are you spooning me?"

"Oh. Sorry."

He rolled onto his back and stretched. "What time is it?"

She glanced at her watch. "It's 9:47."

"Oh, we overslept," Sark said, "We need to get to work."

* * *

They sat in their rental car, parked on the street outside the apartment that Wells was supposedly renting. The light was on in the bathroom of the apartment, but they couldn't see any movement.

"So," Sydney tried to make small talk, "You didn't get along with Wells when you were younger?"

Sark considered her question without taking his eyes off the apartment. "Yes, I suppose you could say that."

"Why?"

"I think you know me well enough to know that I'm not easy to get along with," he replied. "I didn't like him. I thought he was weak. That's all. I had no tolerance for him."

"So what ever happened?"

He finally looked away from the window and at her, indirectly though; he was looking more past her head to the sidewalk outside the car, behind her.

"Nothing happened. He finished out his time at boarding school, and I was withdrawn when I was 15, by your mother. I started working for her then."

"And you haven't seen him since?"

"No."

"And you think he killed your mother."

"Yes."

"Or he was working for someone who wanted you to think he killed her. Or maybe someone who hired him to kill her."

"Yes," he said, his voice betraying his irritation, "Isn't that what we're here to find out? The entire point of this little junket?"

"Yeah. I'm just saying, maybe Wells' involvement has nothing to do with your prior relationship. It could've been anyone. You would've hunted them down just the same."

"I suppose, yes."

"So maybe someone did this to bring you out of hiding."

He stared at her. "What would the point of that be? Last time I checked, my bank account is still missing the eight hundred million dollars used by your dear old auntie to run the Covenant. Look how well that turned out."

"Maybe they don't want your mon—" she stopped when he pointed to the window. The bathroom light was off. Just then the front door of the apartment building opened, and Wells stepped out onto the sidewalk.

He now had a beard, and his hair was longer than in the pictures they had from Jack, but it was him. He paused to light up a cigarette in the dusk. They were close enough to smell the sulfur from the match, but he seemed oblivious to their presence. After a few drags on the cigarette, he threw the mostly intact fag to the pavement and ground it out with the toe of his shoe.

He glanced around, at the sky, then walked almost directly in front of him to a puke-green Trabant, courtesy of the former East Germany, and started up its noisy two stroke engine.

"Should we follow him?" Sark asked, suddenly uncharacteristically unsure what to do, now that he was faced with the possibility of actually finding out what had happened to Anastasia.

"I think we should wait until tomorrow—it's Thursday, maybe his contact will call and we can trail him then. It might be too early to make a move."

"Right," Sark agreed, not sounding convinced. "So, now what?"

"Are you hungry?"

"I suppose I could be," he replied.

"Well, I don't know about you," she smiled, "But I don't think our five-star hotel has a restaurant. Want to check someplace else out?"

"Alright," he said, and started the engine.

* * *

Hours later, they stumbled back to Room 147, more than a little tipsy. The bartender at the bar they'd eaten at had brought out his best vodka for the couple on vacation from Moscow. They'd had more than a few shots each.

"You..." Sark said, pointing a waving finger in Sydney's direction, "Are too much of a lightweight to have had… that many shots." He couldn't exactly remember how many it had been.

"Thanks for telling him 'No thanks'," she giggled. "Since my Russian embarrasses you."

He lay back on the bed, the room swaying underneath him. Her Russian really was atrocious. "One of us has to keep up appearances."

He glanced up and was pleased to see she was in the process of taking off her clothes. He could see, when she stripped off her pants, that the bruises he'd left on her stomach in England were nearly gone. Of course, they'd been replaced by a fresh crop from two days before, plus that unseemly scrape down her back. How had that even happened?

As she unbuttoned her shirt, she noticed him staring at her. "What, I'm too warm," she said, as if he needed an explanation.

"Yeah? You are pretty hot," he grinned.

"Sark," she gave him a withering look, but she was blushing. "That is the worst pick-up line I've ever heard."

He patted the comforter beside him. She eyed it with suspicion, like perhaps she didn't want to put her mostly naked body against the strange pattern of greens and browns. Apparently the alcohol overcame her just then, because she stumbled towards the bed and fell, face down, next to him in a fit of laughter.

He wasn't really in the mood for laughter anymore, but he was amused by her. He lay next to her, watching as silent shudders of laughter wracked her body, shaking the old decrepit bed. She lay with her forehead on her arms, her hair curtaining her face. As she laughed, one of her legs bent helplessly at the knee and her foot lolled stupidly in the air above them.

She laughed for a good five minutes. She'd almost stop, then something would set her off again, and she'd start laughing so hard it sounded like she almost couldn't breathe. Finally the spasms of laughter subsided, and she raised her head to look at him. There were tears leaking out of the corners of her eyes.

"What's so funny," he asked.

"Everything," she whispered before starting another hysterical fit of laughter.

_Oh, crap_, he thought, _this kind of laughter is not an aphrodisiac_.

He rolled towards her, propped himself up on his left elbow and fumbled with the clasp of her bra with his less-able right hand. The bra had left a dent in her skin, a red mark where her flesh had been pressed into for hours. The kind of little wound you don't even notice until the offending piece of clothing was removed, and then you couldn't understand how you had born the irritation for so long.

"Hey, scratch my back," she said, her voice muffled by the comforter and her arms.

Instead, he leaned over and kissed the spot, tasted the light salt of her skin. He did scratch her back a little, the curve of her spine, but really more tickling her. She was incredibly ticklish, he'd noticed. But that could be bent to his advantage.

"Mmm," she moaned without lifting her head. "Can you even get it up?"

He laughed out loud then. "Why don't you find out?"

She giggled a little, but stopped. "I think I might pass out if we did it like this."

She raised her head and looked at him. "But I still want to."

"If you're not in the mood, it's fine," he said, beginning to doubt his own ability to remain conscious long enough to see this endeavor through.

"Nooooo," she pleaded, "Please?" She scrunched closer to him on the bed, close enough for him to kiss her shoulder lightly.

He was surprised at how much he wanted her, even being as silly as she was. She seemed the freest he had ever seen her. She was glowing, probably more from vodka burning its way through her than from him, he supposed, but she was so silky and warm under his fingers.

"Turn the light off," he whispered, and motioned with his chin towards the light on the rickety bedside table.

"Why are you whispering," she whispered back, "It's not like anyone else is here."

"You don't know that," he said, his lips on hers. She felt wobbly in his arms, boneless with inebriation. "Sydney?" She wasn't really returning his kisses.

She had passed out. He scrunched his eyelids shut in disappointment, but yawned despite himself. After clicking the light off, he rolled her onto her side, away from him, and draped his arm over her. She was too drunk to wake up and beat him up for spooning her. Besides, she felt nice, curled against him like this.

He closed his eyes and tried not to think too much.


	27. Chapter 27

She hadn't felt this terrible in years. Maybe since college, even. She lay on her side, waiting for the next wave of nausea to overtake her, so she could go visit the revolting toilet in the tiny bathroom, the room so tiny she couldn't even close to door to stand puking in private.

This was the worst thing about being partners with someone, she noted mentally. They saw everything about you; your best and your worst sides. This was definitely not her best side.

The last thing she could distinctly remember was his unhooking her bra and her laughing at something. She didn't understand now what had been so funny.

Sark appeared to be fine; bastard. He had been awake and reviewing the intel on Wells for the thousandth time when she'd awakened and run into the bathroom. He had the decency not to talk to her when she came out and laid back down, cautiously, so as not to jar her fragile stomach. Even the thought of food made her want to vomit all over again.

After four trips to the bathroom, he'd gotten up and walked to the door.

"I'll be back," he said, pulling on his coat.

_Fine, go_, she thought, miserably. _Leave me here sick_.

What had happened last night? They had gone to dinner, drank way too much, he'd tried to make out with her, but she'd passed out. What had she been doing, trying to match him shot for shot? She knew she couldn't drink that much. She disliked how much he made her feel out of balance, like her own rules didn't matter.

Her irritation was causing her stomach to churn more. Think of pleasant things, like… the ocean. Like the mountains. Anything besides this stupid weird hotel and stupid Sark.

As if on cue, the door opened then and he strode back in, a small package in his hand.

"Here," he said curtly, throwing the package in her general direction. "You need to drink one of those, dissolved in some hot water. I'll get some from downstairs."

The door closed behind him and she picked up the package. Vitamin C? Yuck. She hated trying to swallow any kind of pill.

A few minutes later he returned with a small metal teapot of water and a ceramic cup that had a fairly large chip out of the lip. He took the package from her hand, where she'd been holding it since he'd left, and pressed two of the tablets from the blister pack into the cup. Water.

"Give it a minute to dissolve, then drink it," he fairly commanded her, before his tone softened a little, "It tastes horrible, but it can't be worse than the stuff in your stomach tastes."

She blinked her eyes in agreement, afraid if she moved she'd vomit again.

He stood over her, just looking at her. She knew she looked dreadful. She needed a shower.

He sighed and said, "I shouldn't have let you get so drunk. That wasn't very… considerate of me." He peered into the cup. "It's ready."

She forced herself to raise her head, and take the cup from the table. He was right, it tasted god-awful; bitter, with an aftertaste like chalk. She sipped carefully at first, afraid she'd vomit as soon as it hit her stomach. But her middle didn't revolt, and she kept drinking. To her great surprise, she was starting to feel better.

"What is that," she croaked, "How did you know to do that?"

"My mother did it for me once, when I was really young," Sark shrugged. "It's come in handy a time or two."

"Can you remember your mom?" she asked, suddenly realizing she had no idea if he did, or not.

"Just little things," Sark said, honestly. "That she smoked this particular brand of Russian cigarettes, how she fought with Lazarey… her trying to protect me from him."

She looked away, not sure what to say.

"Sydney, it was a long time ago, it's in the past," he absolved her of needing to say something supportive. Thank goodness. Strength in awkward situations wasn't really her forte. She got that from Jack.

"I think I can work now," she said at last. "But I need to take a shower."

"Yes, do," he agreed, "And for the love of God, brush your teeth as well."

* * *

By 3:30, they were parked outside Wells' apartment again. Sark was distressed to find that the Bucharest he remembered, one of stately old Baroque buildings and gracious parks, a city not unlike London, was gone. Many of the existing buildings had been torn down and the skyline was cluttered with poured concrete high rises.

He remembered more about Anastasia than he'd let on to Sydney. Like how they'd go to the park when Lazarey wasn't around, which was… most of the time, luckily for them. He vaguely remembered having some visits from a friend of Anastasia's, a tall proud woman with a mane of dark brown hair. Then the day came when he went to spend the night with her friend. That "night" wound up lasting 10 years.

As if on cue, Wells emerged from his apartment, a cell phone pressed to his ear.

"_Da, da_," they heard him saying, rushed. "I'll be there in 10 minutes."

He walked again to the little Traubi, which backfired impertinently as Wells gunned its motor. They waited until he was almost out of sight before starting the engine of their car.

They tailed him cautiously, letting him get nearly out of sight before they would turn a corner, then speeding up to catch up with him. They kept at least three cars between them in traffic, at all times.

Sydney clutched the edge of the seat, as if she were worried the car might suddenly skitter onto two wheels. He felt a glimmer of sympathy for her; her stomach was probably not the strongest after her quality time in the bathroom this morning.

Wells sped into an underground parking garage, and Sark pulled over with a sharp jerk of the wheel.

"Hurry up, get out!" he commanded her, and reached across her to fling the door open when she looked at him stupidly.

"What are you doing?" she cried, reaching to shut the door.

"He won't recognize you," Sark explained rapidly, "Get out and follow him, I'll park the car somewhere up here and meet up with you, go!"

She sighed impatiently as she unhooked her seatbelt and threw her leg out of the car. "You'd better not leave me here in the middle of the East Bloc," she warned, but he was already rolling off to find a place to ditch the car.

* * *

She didn't like the feeling of this. At all. Nothing good ever happened in parking garages. Like the time the men from Security Section had tried to kill her and her father had shown up to save the day. The day she found out he was a spy.

She strolled, as calmly as possible, down the pedestrian walkway that ran along the driveway into the garage Wells had disappeared into. She took her hair out of its ponytail in a fluid movement, shaking her long hair free. She was… a woman about town. She regretted not paying closer attention to her surroundings—she didn't think they were in a shopping district—but there was no time for that now. The garage was small, maybe 200 spaces. There weren't many places for Wells to go.

A fluorescent light buzzed and snapped above her, as if a large, obstinate bug were trapped inside its glass tube. The light flickered accordingly. She tried to keep striding confidently, remembering her safety training as a freshman at college—walk with a purpose, keep your head up—but nerves were making her slouch. Water dripped somewhere behind her.

Just then, the muted _whump_ of a car door slamming, albeit a rickety, never-well-made car door, gave Wells away. She crouched behind the rear wheel of a Mercedes and glanced under back end of the car towards where she'd heard the noise. She saw Wells, striding towards the stairwell in the corner, shoving his keys in his pocket.

She waited until the door to the stairwell had clicked closed before she reached into her jacket pocket and dialed Sark's number.

"Where is he?" Sark picked up before it had even finished ringing.

"He's heading up to street level, in the stairwell on the northwest corner of the structure," she whispered.

"I see him," Sark's voice was low, predatory. "I assume you're close behind."

"I'm on my—"

Something hard struck her in the back of the skull, just before she had risen back to her full height. She pitched forward, her cell phone tumbling away from her, and the heel of her hand scraping the dirty concrete floor of the parking garage. Before she could even catch herself, someone's shin and ankle connected with her midsection. She doubled over in pain, and just as she tried to roll over to fight back, the unseen assailant pistol-whipped her into unconsciousness.

* * *

Damn, she had hung up; Sark pressed 'end' without looking at his phone and hurried after Wells. They were outside a large building, what was it?

Wells turned and hurried up the sidewalk towards the entrance of the building, unaware of his presence.

Sark noticed the signage, carved into the stone next to the doors: CITY LIBRARY.

Mr. Wells staged his meets in a library? That certainly didn't seem conducive to secrecy. Then again, libraries were full of secrets, the kind waiting to be discovered.

He paused for a second outside the doors, waiting for Wells to hurry up the stairs and around the corner. He scanned the area for her, but didn't make her out anywhere amongst the throngs of pedestrians on the street. Where was she, what was taking so long?

As if on cue, his cell phone rang—it was her.

"Sydney, this really is no time for sightseeing," he said, dryly, "Where on earth are you?"

There was light breathing on the line. "If you want to see Ms. Bristow again, I suggest you go to the second floor, to the archives."

The voice was deep, gravelly, almost certainly disguised with a voice box. "Who is this," he demanded, his stomach doing flip-flops. They'd been made.

"I'm afraid that's need-to-know," the voice said, chilling Sark to his very marrow by parroting his own favorite phrase. "Just follow Wells."

_Click._

_Sonuvabitch_, Sark cursed silently. He rarely cursed, it really wasn't his style, but this was not how he envisioned this going at all.

He pushed the swinging glass door open and strode to the information desk. "Excuse me," he said, not very politely and in fairly bad Romanian, "Can you please direct me to the second floor archive?"

The desk clerk was a mousy girl, maybe 18, who looked a little like Nadia Comaneci before she'd gone glam and married Bart Connor. Before she was allowed to eat. "Um… you go, like, up the stairs, to where it says '2', and then you like, make a left turn?" She sounded like an East Bloc Valley Girl, and not terribly convinced of her own directions.

"Are you certain, or are you like, not sure?" he mocked her. He loathed her for her lack of appreciation for the urgency of his situation.

"No, that's where it is," she said, chewing her thumb nail. "You're like, welcome, sir."

He bolted towards the stairs without thanking her, and sprinted up them two at a time. He rounded the corner to the left, and pushed through the glass doors with the words ARCHIVE spelled across the glass.

The vault was as silent as a tomb. There didn't appear to be anyone in here, except for the librarian working at an ancient computer terminal behind the high countertop.

"Excuse me," Sark said, breathless from his run, "Was there just a man through here, someone slightly taller than me, not shaven?"

The librarian nodded, and finally looked up at him after she continued typing for several seconds longer than he thought he could bear. "He's in the stacks," she replied, and pointed towards the door that appeared to lead into the archive itself.

"Thank you," he said, already on the move.

He burst through the door into the heavy silence of the stacks. It was just rows and rows of shelves, no tables or desks. He stood still, trying to hear footsteps or breathing. There was nothing but the quiet rumble of the building's ventilation system pushing the warm, stale air through the cavernous room.

He reached under his right arm, and drew out his pistol. Eased off the thumb safety.

He stepped into the first row of shelves, easing his weight heel-to-toe, as silently as possible. Where had Wells gone? When he reached the end of the first row, he glanced lengthways down the far aisle of the stacks.

Wells was standing at the far end, leaning on the wall, hands in his pockets.

"Julian, put your gun down," Wells said, his English clipped and haughty in a way not unlike Sark's.

"You first, Daniel," Sark said, calmly. He could take this fucker. He had done it when they were kids, he'd do it now. Just like he'd taken Wells' accent for his own.

"I'm unarmed," Wells shrugged as Sark edged closer. "It wouldn't be seemly for a gentleman to kill an unarmed adversary. Besides, I would hate to leave a mess for the librarians to clean up. They hate when people leave gum or drinks near the materials. Imagine what finding brain matter would be like for them."

"What is this," Sark asked, "Where is your contact?"

"She's not here," Wells said, honestly. "I believe she is babysitting your partner."

Sark raised his gun to Wells' face when he was within 10 feet. "You killed my mother."

Wells chuckled. "I see my letter reached you. It's always good to hear from old friends, isn't it."

The hairs on the back of Sark's neck prickled at the phrase. _You're not the only one who spies on old friends._

"Where is my partner," Sark asked, his voice dangerously calm now. "Or I shoot your pretty face off."

"Julian," Wells sighed with the satisfaction of knowing he had the upper hand, "That would make an awful mess for the librarians. And no one likes to upset a librarian, now, do they?"

Sark lowered his gun, slowly, ever so slowly, waiting for Wells to jump and shoot him. To his surprise, Wells continued to watch him.

"That's better," Wells said agreeably. "Now, how about you and I walk out of here like a couple of old chaps, and you make acquaintances with my employer. She's dying to get to know you."

"What about Sydney?" He didn't trust this setup for a second.

"Ah, you're on a first name basis with the lovely filly," Wells' eyes glittered with a smile. "Who is she? You always were the popular one with the ladies, Julian. Ah, well—we'll have plenty of time to discuss this, in due course."

Wells beckoned, slowly, for Sark to follow him and put his gun in its holster. Sark followed, reluctantly, through the stacks without sheathing the weapon.

He didn't like this one bit.


	28. Chapter 28

"Leave us."

Sydney heard the voice through a dull fog of pain. Her life seemed to be on a repetitious loop. Hadn't she just gone through this whole knocked-out-strapped-to-a-chair bit just two weeks earlier? Her skills were slipping.

The door clicked closed behind her and she heard footsteps behind her. A woman's footsteps. Immediately her mind flashed back to Taipei, when she had been captured and her mother—the 'Man'—had reappeared only to shoot her in the shoulder.

_Click. Click. Click. Scuff. Click. _

The woman was wearing heels, she could tell that much. Was this the person who had kicked her in the gut? She couldn't tell for certain.

"So, you are following Mr. Wells," the voice said, in English but heavily accented.

She stayed silent. The base of her skull throbbed too badly to risk turning to try to see the speaker. She was afraid she might vomit.

"Julian- with him you are working?" the voice asked. Actually, it was more like, _Julian, viz heem you are vorkink_?

"Well, I'm not working for him, that's for sure." _Yeah, good one Syd. That was like the old Syd. Sassy. Tough. _

"You are not a… how do you say, a… prostitute, then?" the voice sounded amused.

"No, I'm sure prostitutes make better money than I do," she said wryly.

"We were not sure," the voice explained. "You were very flirty at the restaurant yesterday night."

Sydney stared at a spot on the floor. It looked like it might be old blood.

_Click. Click. Click. _

Sydney felt a hand on her hair. Her skin crawled as The Voice stroked her hair, played with it.

"You have the same hair as your mother," the speaker said. "Irina was always vain about her looks."

"Who are you?" Sydney asked at last.

_Clickclickclick_. The speaker stepped around in front of her in a quick movement.

Sydney swallowed as Anastasia looked down at her, flipping her auburn hair over her shoulder. "Irina told me so much about you, in her letters. How proud she was of you. You were her proudest accomplishment."

Sydney sat in tightlipped disbelief. Had Irina known Anastasia was alive? She had a sinking feeling she'd been right about the photo of Anastasia; it had all been an elaborate ruse to draw Sark out of hiding.

* * *

Wells hurried Sark to a limo with tinted windows waiting outside the library at the curb. Sark, against his better judgment, got into the car first and arranged himself across from Wells so he could draw his gun if he needed to.

The car swayed and bounced along the potholed streets, like a boat charting rough waters. Mostly they just stared at each other.

"So, how's _life_ been, Julian?" Wells asked, a gleam of malice in his eye. "I figured by now you'd be running the whole intelligence world ragged with some evil plot to take over the world." This was clearly a jab at Sark's repeated incarceration by the CIA.

"I see you've fared no better," Sark said, bored. "I at least had the sense to get out of the business for awhile until the market bottomed out and came around again."

"You," Wells said, his voice slightly accusatory, "Have no business sucking up a market share from the rest of us. What does a dilettante like you need with ops work, with your fortune?"

Sark eyed Wells, not giving anything away. How did this sorry fuck know about his inheritance? And if he knew, how could he NOT know that there was nothing left of it?

"I like to keep busy," he said with a one-shouldered shrug. "Helps prevent Alzheimer's, keeping one's brain active."

Wells stared at him. "You always were a wanker."

"Takes one to know one."

Wells smiled at that, and they fell silent.

* * *

"Irina, Irina, Irina," Anastasia turned her mother's name over on her tongue like a piece of hard candy, "How is your darling mother? I haven't heard from her in so long."

"What do you want with us?" Sydney ignored the question about Irina. She wasn't here to discuss her own mother.

Anastasia made a small voiceless noise with her tongue that sounded distinctly like one that Sark made when he was disappointed, "My dear, everyone likes to know what's happened to old friends."

Sydney stuck her chin out and looked Anastasia in the eye.

"Fine, then," Anastasia shrugged and drew a package of cigarettes out of her pocket. She drew one out with her long, slender fingers, and flicked her lighter in the general vicinity of the tip of the cigarette. She closed her bright blue eyes, almost as if in ecstasy, as she dragged a deep breath of smoke into her lungs. She held it for what seemed like an impossibly long time before she exhaled it into Sydney's face.

"Irina and I had a lot in common," Anastasia began, in Russian. Sydney wished she had paid better attention in language protocol at SD-6. Sark was right, her Russian was pathetic.

"We were so impressionable, when we were 18 and in the KGB. So much promise. We were special- or, we thought we were, anyway," she gave a short, braying laugh, a sound uncharacteristic of such an elegant, refined being. "We thought your mother had it bad—new country, new language, so far from home and her friends. Nikola and I were lucky!"

Sydney pressed her lips together and wondered if Sark had found Wells. Then the thought passed over her like a shudder; what if Sark had betrayed her? Had he kicked her out of the car, knowing someone was waiting to attack her?

"My assignment," Anastasia drew on the cigarette heartily, "was fun at first. To be… the other woman, the plaything. I liked it. Even though I knew it wasn't for real. Lazarey was a great fuck in his day," she laughed throatily and tendrils of smoke curled over her upper lip from her nostrils. "I wonder if he passed that on," she said, raising one scarlet eyebrow at Sydney.

She just stared back, but she could feel her cheeks flush a little.

"Lazarey had a temper, such a temper," Anastasia smiled a bit, maybe wistfully, "He would be sullen and fly into a fit of rage, smash things."

"Julian was the best thing about that assignment," she said, now certainly wistful. "Those first few years of his life were so precious. He was so precocious, curious about everything. Why, why why—it was always why this or that, Mummy, how come there are animals with legs and some with wings, how come there are different languages?"

She stared sullenly at Anastasia's little walk down memory lane. This was such a joke. Her life was a great cosmic joke.

"Lazarey resented Julian's presence, I think. The secrecy of his birth, how he was entrapped from both sides by the government," Anastasia continued. "There was nowhere to go; he had Nikola and Natashya to take care of, he couldn't afford our relationship to be public. Which, of course, was exactly the idea."

Anastasia paused, and she looked at Sydney with a gaze that felt like she could see into Sydney's very organs—the same way he looked at her. "After several years of his rages, his terrorizing us, Irina suggested we send Julian away, somewhere where he was safe from Lazarey and the designs the Special Research division of the KGB had on his inheritance."

"I was supposed to go to meet him, eventually, raise him myself," Anastasia hissed. "But instead, Irina took off and took him for herself. Your greedy, selfish mother took my own son from me."

Sydney stared straight ahead without blinking. This didn't bode well for her, or for Sark.

* * *

Irina strode through Otopeni airport; she never appeared hurried, even when she was in a rush. She moved with a strong, confident, languid gait. One she'd passed on to all her progeny in one way or another. The girls, particularly, had a characteristic strut when they were working.

Sark had been more difficult. He was sullen, stubborn when she'd collected him from the prep school. Perhaps understandably so—she'd deliberately left him basically on his own, tending only to his tuition payments and periodically meeting in secret with the headmaster to make sure they didn't expel him for his behavior.

Anastasia was not dead, after all. She was back, here in Bucharest. Irina had networked her way here, finding out that Wells was in Anastasia's employ for several years now.

Outside in the fading daylight, Irina hailed a cab.

"City library, please," she told the driver, and leaned back against the worn leather seat as he tore off into the evening traffic jam.

She knew the librarian who ran the archives, an unassuming woman who had a lot of time on her hands and whose acquaintance she had made when she and Anastasia had met there, 20 years earlier, to sketch out their plan to put Sark into hiding.

Anastasia had been reluctant, but Irina was more skilled at persuasion than her friend, and Anastasia had eventually acquiesced. They had originally planned on a school closer to them, perhaps in Austria or West Germany, but after a particularly brutal fight with Lazarey that had left Anastasia with a black eye, they'd settled on England.

She had been Anastasia's link to Sark, keeping her informed about how her son was doing. She didn't let Anastasia know that Julian had been put into agent training at the school. It was no accident that they picked the school they had in England. She knew it was a proving ground for MI-6's version of Project Christmas. So in a way, she and Jack had had similar reasoning for what they had done.

It didn't change her anger that Jack had subjected Sydney to the protocol. But it was too late.

But then, unexpectedly, Anastasia had dropped out of contact. Sark had been about 10, when Anastasia had stopped making their meets in Berlin. She had no idea where she'd gone. Nikola didn't know, and neither did anyone else at the KGB. Then the USSR had dissolved, and everything had gotten completely messed up.

40 minutes later, the cab screeched to a halt outside the library, and she threw too much money over the seat at the cabbie. "Keep the change," she commanded as his eyeballs grew wide at the wad of cash.


	29. Chapter 29

The car Wells and Sark were riding in swayed and bounced and finally came to a stop outside a building in a decidedly industrial area, far from their origin at the formal elegance of the city library.

"Where are we," Sark asked, bored with this routine. He should just shoot the driver, and Wells to boot, and just storm the place himself.

"Julian, no need to get your knickers in a knot," Wells purred, "If you'll follow me, please."

They stepped out of the car and entered the building. There were three heavily armed guards at the entrance, but they stood down when they saw Wells with Sark. Perhaps storming the building unaided wasn't the best course of action.

Wells led Sark through a complicated maze of hallways, each one growing more dim as they descended several staircases. Finally, when Sark was nearly convinced they would open a door and wind up in China, they came to a wood-paneled door with a peephole. Wells knocked lightly, almost too politely for the situation.

"Da?" a man's voice, muffled by the wood, came through the door.

"It's me," Wells replied in Russian, "Let us in, will you?"

They heard the man fumbling with the locks on the inside of the door, and Sark saw Wells roll his eyes. It was clear that Wells enjoyed a position of some prominence within this organization, whatever it was.

Wells motioned for Sark to walk through the door first, and Sark declined. "After you," he said, not very nicely. He didn't know that someone wasn't waiting around the corner to bludgeon him into unconsciousness.

Wells shrugged and walked into the room, ahead of Sark. "I would've killed you by now if that were my aim, Julian," Wells said, "But then, you always were a bit better at this game than I."

Sark only raised one eyebrow at the roundabout compliment. He knew it was true, but would never have brought it up.

The room was small, and had only a chair and table for the guard to sit at. Just as Sark was taking it in, and noticing the door on the opposite side of the room, he heard the sound of a shot through a silencer and the sting of a tranquilizer dart as it pumped its contents into the back of his thigh.

He looked at Wells in disbelief as he slumped forward, so sleepy he couldn't keep standing.

"Yes, you were better, but not that much better," Wells said, and then everything was black.

* * *

"Sark!" she hissed his name at first, so as not to alert the guard. They had drug him in, tied him to a chair in front of her, and left them alone. The door to the room they were in had no knob on their side.

His blonde head was limp, his chin to his chest. She couldn't tell what they had done to him, though there was no visible bruising.

"SARK!" she fairly shouted, and he stirred a little.

"Mmmm," he moaned without raising his head. "Why are you yelling?"

"Wake up," she whispered again, urgently. "I'm yelling because you're passed out and you need to wake up so you can be of some use."

"Where are we," he mumbled, still not looking up. It was like his chin was glued to his chest.

"I don't know," she scrunched forward on the chair as best as her bonds would allow. "Someone ambushed me in the garage when I went in to follow Wells—I told you it was a bad idea to split up," she accused him.

"Sydney, please," he finally raised his head. "This isn't the CIA. There won't be a briefing later where we can assign guilt as to why the operation went wrong."

"Shut up," she spat. "Listen, while you were off pursuing Wells, I've been in here, talking to your mother."

They stared at each other for a long minute. When he didn't say anything, she finally clarified, unnecessarily, "Anastasia's alive."

"So it would seem," Sark replied, his bored tone infuriating her for some indescribable reason. She wanted some kind of reaction from him.

"Do you have selective hearing?" she said, "I said, your MOTHER is alive."

"Yes, I heard you perfectly clearly," he pursed his lips. "This is not the shocking revelation for me that it might have been for you."

More staring commenced.

"Fine," she said at last, "Be like that. But apparently she's pretty pissed that my mother put you into hiding. I don't think she has a beef with us, I think it's with Irina."

* * *

Irina strode into the library and straight up to the archive on the second floor. Natalya was still typing at the ancient computer terminal that Sark had interrupted her at hours earlier. She looked up at Irina when she pushed the glass door open and sashayed up to the counter.

"Irina!" she smiled, a real smile, not the polite professional smile she flashed for the patrons. "It's been forever!"

"Natalya, darling," she said, embracing the smaller woman's frame in her long arms, "It's been too long—but time is short, I need your help."

"Of course," Natalya replied, "Come with me, into the processing room."

They wound their way through the stacks into a small, cluttered room full of rubber gloves, half-empty jars of preservation fluids, scissors askew on top of plastic cover material. Natalya drew up a stool and perched on the edge, expectantly.

"It's about Anastasia," Irina began, but the librarian cut her off.

"She's been here recently, to meet a man," Natalya said.

Irina drew a surveillance photo of her own from under her long coat and Natalya nodded in recognition of Wells. "Yes, that's him—he was just here a few hours ago, but she didn't come."

Irina raised her eyebrows. "Yes?"

"Yes, he was alone, but a young man was following him, a tall blonde gentleman," Natalya gestured with her hand a little above Irina's head. "He was in quite a hurry, then they left together."

"Julian," Irina breathed, and closed her eyes. She knew it was a trap; why had he not come to her first when he'd gotten the photo of Anastasia?

"Julian?" Natalya's eyebrows shot up in surprise, "Anastasia's son? Has it been that long already?"

"More that 20 years," Irina smiled softly, "When she used to bring him."

"The days are long, but time is short," Natalya shook her head, ruefully. "What is it, is something wrong?"

"I don't know," Irina said, honestly, "I'm afraid he may be in danger."

* * *

"So you've had some time to get acquainted with Anastasia," Sark said at last. "How is my dear old mum?"

Sydney stared at him like he had two heads. He knew she was in shock at his nonchalance about hearing the news that his long-lost mother was alive after all. He had not, however, spent 20 years dreaming up a fantasy that could never be fulfilled by an actual person. He had not been kidding about not loving anyone.

"She talked to me for awhile, yes," Sydney replied, measured.

"And?"

Sydney shrugged as best she could, tied to the chair. "Like I said, it sounds like she's mad at my mother, and that this all really has nothing to do with us. We're just the bait for some kind of elaborate revenge scheme."

"Brilliant," Sark closed his eyes. "Irina will come, she'll find us here."

"What makes you think that? I don't think she's too thrilled about our partnership, you know."

"I'm well aware of that, thank you."

"So," Sydney narrowed her eyes at him, "Why did you tell her?"

"Why did you tell Jack?"

They stared at each other for a long time.

"She asked if I'd seen you recently," Sark finally admitted. "She misses you."

"Oh."

"No details were shared, only that you had promised me some intel in exchange for my discretion about our… encounter."

"We never did talk about that," Sydney said, her voice low, "Why you double-crossed me anyway."

Sark shrugged, unapologetic. "I like to see Agent Vaughn suffer. Much the same as I used to make Wells suffer. He brings out the worst in me."

"Sark!" Sydney's brow knit together in frustration.

"What?" Sark shot back. "You were coming apart at the seams already—you were as much a willing participant as I."

"That is none of your business," she whispered, on the edge of tears.

"It's not?" he mocked her, "Tell me again, how it's not my concern that you came to my house, to hunt me down like an animal, creeping around in my stable. I didn't force you to do anything you didn't want to do, Sydney."

She wouldn't meet his eyes. He could see her lower lip twitch, that she was trying to hold back tears. He felt no remorse. She got this kicked puppy look when she was on the verge of tears that made him feel extra cruel. He was getting that delicious _Schadenfreude_ feeling again.

"How was it supposed to end up, then?" his voice was low, "You and him? How were you ever going to leave this life? Where were you going to go?"

"Shut up," she whispered, "Just shut up."

"No!" Sark exclaimed, surprised at his anger at her, "Don't be ridiculous! You know it _could never happen_, Sydney, that's why you never told him, isn't it."

She sniffled then, and he could see the thin line of snot running down her upper lip, towards her mouth. She sniffed harder and managed to stem the flow of mucous temporarily, but still she said nothing.

"Isn't it?" he pressed her, "You can't leave this life because you don't know how to be anything else. Because there is no 'else' for people like us."


	30. Chapter 30

She scrunched her eyes closed and sniffed as hard as she could. She couldn't even move her arms to wipe the snot where it was gushing from her nose.

"Because there is no 'else' for people like us," Sark concluded.

Eyes still closed, she shook her head back and forth slowly, not willing to agree with him.

"Sydney," his voice softened a little then, "I… Sometimes I'm not so good with…"

"I said, SHUT UP!" she yelled then. She couldn't, wouldn't hear his apology. He wasn't sorry. She knew he wasn't sorry. He was probably getting off on hurting her feelings.

The silence in the tiny room was broken only by her occasional sniffling.

When she could finally trust her voice, she said, "All this time, I thought if only I'd known that SD-6 weren't the CIA, that I would never have taken the entrance exam. If I'd have known who I'd be working for, if I'd have known it would cost me the lives of so many people I've… _loved_," her voice broke as she said it, "I would've walked away."

He just looked at her, his head cocked to the side.

"But hindsight is always 20-20, isn't it," she said, bitterly.

"If not SD-6, it would've been someone else," Sark said. "We were destined for it long before we made a conscious decision to follow this path."

She refused to admit, out loud, that he was right. It was like the dream she had where she was following someone around a curved hallway, and just as she'd catch up to them, they'd get out of sight again. The truth kept slipping away just as she'd grab at it.

"It's not destiny," she sighed, "It's predetermination."

* * *

"I think we're arguing semantics," Sark offered, trying to smooth over her ruffled feathers. He'd apparently hit a nerve.

"No," she insisted, finally raising her head. "Destiny implies something good at the end, predetermination just implies a lack of choices. "

Sark considered her assertion without meeting her eyes.

"This really is it, isn't it," she nodded, like she'd made up her mind. "It's going to be like this forever."

"It's going to be like what?"

"I'm going to be a spy forever," she whispered, her lips trembling again, and then she pursed them as big, fat tears started rolling down her cheeks. Her eyes glittered with unshed tears and the need for him to say something, make some comment on her revelation.

He glanced at the floor, at a curious brown spot that appeared to be old blood, before glancing back at her. He felt very low for forcing her to this point. It wasn't a moment he had cared to share with anyone. Several years of near solitary confinement had driven him to the realization at a much earlier stage than her, apparently.

"Yes," he said simply.

* * *

Irina left the library and hailed a cab in a rush. She had the license plate number of the car Wells and Sark had left the library in several hours before. The police would do a trace, for a small fee.

Her cab squealed to a halt at the curb outside the police department and she threw some money over the seat at the cabbie.

Inside, the clerk on duty took one look at her and said, sullenly, "Yeah? Whaddya want?"

"Hello, Bela," she read his nametag and smiled coyly at him, like he was the best-looking man she'd ever seen. He was 50 pounds overweight and in bad need of a haircut, crumbs decorating the front of his uniform. "I need your help."

"You'll have to wait for the chief."

"Oh, no," she said, "That won't be necessary—I'm sure he's a busy man, why don't you just run this plate for me and I'll be on my way?"

"Can't." Bela shook his head and continued flipping through his magazine. Irina caught sight of a girl with breasts as big as a cow's on one page.

"Of course you can," Irina pleaded with him, "It'll only take a second. I just need to know who owns the car."

"Sorry, lady," Bela said, unapologetic. "Rules are rules."

"You know," Irina said slowly, as though the thought were just occurring to you, "I do have some extra cash on me… If that would help."

"Nope, not no way, not no how," Bela didn't even look up from the Asian twins he was staring at.

"Enough to buy lot more magazines like that one," Irina said, slowly. "On the black market of course."

Bela glanced up from his reading. "Show me."

Irina produced a wad of 10,000 lei bills and counted off ten. She knew it was too little. A hundred thousand lei wouldn't buy a pack of bubble gum.

"Sweetheart," Bela said, "Stop wasting my time."

"I have dollars, if you prefer," she said, producing a twenty from inside the lump of bills.

She flicked the twenty onto the counter along side the lei.

"That's more like it," he snatched the bills greedily and folded them into his breast pocket. "Now, what is this plate number?"

"Here," she passed him a slip of paper.

Bela searched with flourish, as if he were really doing her a favor. She ignored his theatrics and wondered how different Romania might have been if Nicolae Ceauşescu hadn't been in charge for twenty-odd years.

"Alright," he pronounced, "The car in question has a business license, to an AMS Industries, Inc. You want the address?"

"Yes, that would be wonderful," Irina smiled sweetly, wondering at the lack of creativity on Anastasia's part, to name her front company for her own initials.

Bela scribbled the building number and street name on the same scrap of paper as the license plate number and gave it back to her. "Take care, now," he said, returning to his magazine before she even moved away from the counter.

* * *

They sat in relative silence, save for the occasional sniffle on her part to try to stem the flow of snot from her nose. Her head throbbed from the blow to the back, her hangover, and now the clogged sinuses from her tears. She hadn't had a headache this bad since she'd woken up in Hong Kong and found out Vaughn had married another woman. That day, along with this one, could perhaps go on her list of Top Ten, All-Time Worst Days Ever. Better add the day she found Danny shot in the bathtub to that as well. That might actually be ahead of Hong Kong.

As bad as their predicament was, she felt oddly endeared to Sark in this moment. At least he was consistent. _Consistently sociopathic_, she smiled.

"Are you feeling better?" he asked, ducking his head to try to meet her eyes.

"No," she smiled, not raising her head, "I feel fucking awful."

"Then why are you smiling—I certainly don't find this particularly amusing."

She smiled even bigger then, thinking of the day they'd released him in the Mexican desert in exchange for one of their own agents.

"_I assure you, this organization, the Covenant, is as much a mystery to me as it is to the CIA," he said as she undid his leg shackles inside the van. "I can't imagine why they'd want to make this trade." _

"_You're about to find out," she said, nearly glib to be rid of him. _

_He stared down at her, unsmiling. "My life's in danger—isn't it." _

_She met his eyes, but didn't say anything. It was obvious what she thought, and that she didn't care what happened to him__ i_

Truth be told, she would've been slightly disappointed if he'd been killed that day. He was her only remaining link to her life, the one she had before she had disappeared. Everyone else was gone—Francie dead, Will in witness protection in Wisconsin, her dad only just released from custody. Irina had disappeared. Dixon had been promoted to director. And Vaughn... she had never, even to this day, really forgiven him for giving up on finding her and marrying Lauren. She admitted it was illogical, the idea of his maintaining hope of finding her when her remains had been identified; but it didn't seem, at least to her, like someone could move on from 6 months of searching and grieving over their supposed soul mate's death and being married within the span of little more than 12 months.

Yes, Sark had stayed the same, when everyone else had changed, had spent the same two years in CIA custody, in a bubble, isolated and untouched by the world around them.

"You and I, we're destined to work together—I truly believe that," he'd said, and she was beginning to believe it herself.

* * *

Irina directed the taxi to drop her off several blocks from the address Bela had given her. They were a good distance outside of the city, in what could only be construed as the wrong side of the tracks. It was an industrial area, but a run-down, shady one at that.

"Do you want me to wait?" the cabbie eyed her suspiciously. "I could come with you, maybe."

"No," Irina shook her head, "This will be fine, thank you."

"Alright, lady," the driver said, and peeled off.

_Coward_, Irina thought.

She crept cautiously to the end of the street named on the slip of paper before drawing her gun. She sank down on one knee and peered around the corner. Outside the entrance to one building, there were two heavy-set guards toting semi-automatics. Steadying her elbow on her bent knee, she shot the first guard in the throat.

She heard him go down like a sack of garbage and his partner yelling his name. Quickly, she peeked around the corner and took out the second guard with a shot to the temple where he bent over his friend. She had to be quick- she was certain there were surveillance cameras in the area.

Over to the pile of bodies she ran, gun drawn, and grabbed the security access card from the top guard's breast pocket. She swiped the magnetic card in the reader on the doorframe and smiled just a little as it hummed and clicked open the lock of the door.

She was in.

* * *

Episodes: 

i Succession. Season 3, Episode 2. Written by Robert Orci & Alex Kurtzman-Counter

* * *

Ok... everybody keep their shorts on. I have to re-write the next section, but I'll post it as soon as I'm happy with it. :) Happy holidays! 


	31. Chapter 31

Sydney was still smiling when she saw the door begin to open behind Sark.

The door swung inwards and Anastasia strode into the room.

Anastasia and Sark stared at each other, oblivious to Sydney's presence. She looked between them with some apprehension, unsure of what was going to happen. They were incredibly similar in the face; the same bright blue eyes, same cheekbones. Anastasia's lower lip was a little crooked on the lower left side as well.

"Well?" Sark said in Russian, breaking the silence first.

"It's good to see you, sweetheart," Anastasia said, and Sydney thought for a second Anastasia looked like she might start crying.

Sark said nothing, but pursed his lips and lifted his chin at his mother.

"I've missed you," the older woman continued, "All these years, wondering about what kind of man you'd become."

"You missed me so much you had to fake your own death?" Sark's mouth fell open a little with disbelief. "You know, some people use the telephone to get in touch with their relatives, _Mom_."

Sydney almost laughed out loud at his sarcasm, but bit her lower lip to keep from making a sound. It seemed the better course to stay quiet, and not to interrupt their reunion. This was better than a Jerry Springer episode. She liked Jerry Springer; there were people on that show that were actually more messed up than her own family.

"Hm!" Anastasia made a disapproving noise and pursed her lips. "I see Irina's impertinence has worn off on you… Her daughter—" Anastasia gestured at Sydney without looking at her, "—is a lippy one, too."

Sark closed his lips and Sydney could see the muscle in his jaw shift as he clenched his teeth a little. "I suppose it would be too much to hope that you might untie us."

"I'm sorry," Anastasia's lower lip curled out a bit in a mock pout, "But I need you to stay right here until I get to talk to Irina about this whole misunderstanding."

* * *

Jack was slouched in his desk chair, facing towards the window when the knock came at his door.

"Yes?"

The doorknob clicked open and Vaughn slipped into the office without a word.

"Oh…" Jack's voice trailed off when he saw who it was. "Please, sit down."

"Thanks."

They sat in uncomfortable silence for several minutes before Jack finally spoke.

"I gave her the intel that Sark wanted. Last night."

Vaughn nodded. Jack noticed a considerable five o'clock shadow around Vaughn's jaw line. Jack was suddenly tired, very tired. They'd been here before, five years ago. When Sydney had disappeared from her apartment after the fight with Allison Doren—before Vaughn had given up on finding her alive. Jack felt really, truly old for the first time in his 58 years.

"Where?" Vaughn finally spoke.

"I dropped by your house… I assumed she'd gone home to get her things."

"Yeah, she did," Vaughn said, "I was there when she came home."

"I see." Jack thought of the bruise under Sydney's eye and wondered what had passed between them before he had arrived. Besides Sark, of course.

Vaughn flicked a piece of lint off his trousers and sighed deeply. Jack fidgeted with the fountain pen on his desk that was actually a flash drive. He preferred those cheap black Bic ball-points to anything more expensive. Some things just weren't worth spending the money on.

"So," Vaughn spoke finally, "She's with him, isn't she."

"I believe so, yes."

Vaughn just nodded, not meeting Jack's eyes. "People are starting to ask," he said at last, "Where she is. She hasn't been to work in two days."

Jack looked down at his desk calendar and noticed that it was in fact two full days since Sydney had last been in the office. They'd been in Berlin over the weekend.

"What am I supposed to tell them?" Vaughn looked up, "What am I gonna say?"

Jack continued looking down, considering. He had had it so much easier; "Laura" had died. They had buried her. People could answer their own questions.

"Vaughn," he said, cautiously, "She might come back."

Vaughn's glare told him that he believed that wasn't going to be the case. "Or she might not," Jack conceded.

"I hate to ask this," Jack continued, "But if she does return... Do you think you might be able to rec—"

"No." Vaughn shook his head. "No, Jack, I can't. I'm sorry, but we can't."

"Of course," Jack wasn't about to press the issue.

"How can you even ask me that?" Vaughn was suddenly angry. "After everything that's happened, for it to come to this? God!" Vaughn leaned forward in the chair and pressed the heels of his hands to his eye sockets, elbows on his knees.

Jack studied his son-in-law. He was opening his mouth to say something when Vaughn spoke first.

"After Chechnya, I thought… I dunno, that things would be different between us. That we'd have less secrets, somehow… But when she came back from England, I didn't even notice—on her chest, and her stomach? These bruises she had—like I didn't even _see_ her." Vaughn finally raised his head. He clenched his jaw several times, like he was wrestling with whether or not to continue. "I don't know how you can feel... disappointed about something you didn't even know to expect in the first place, but… I did. I really did," he said at last. "Did you know, Jack? I mean—did you know she was pregnant?"

"No," Jack said honestly, "Sydney has always been very private about her personal life with me."

Vaughn just nodded. "Yeah."

Then Vaughn's forehead creased in memory and he said, "Wait…"

"Wait?" Jack had no idea what he was thinking.

"When she came home—" Vaughn suddenly sat up straight,"—she said Sark already knew the details of the Chechnya mission. How could he have known, the ops reports are encrypted on a secure server?"

"Word gets around quickly in our business," Jack said calmly, "I'm sure news of Dr. Gotz's extraction was quickly made public."

"No," Vaughn shook his head, "I don't mean that—I mean about her miscarriage. That was in the final mission write-up, and Sark wouldn't have been able to hack into the network without Marshall noticing."

"So the leak must've come from inside the agency," Jack's lips pursed into a thin line. "There's a mole."

* * *

Inside the dark hallway of the upper floor of AMS Inc., Irina side-stepped along the corridor, a wall at her back, her gun drawn. The guards outside had been easy; finding Sark and Sydney could prove more dangerous.

She had no idea, the purpose Anastasia had in this; to reappear after so long, to set up such an elaborate ruse to draw Sark out of hiding. Even Irina had not known where he was, though probably more because he had wanted it that way than because she had been unable to find him. She had considered trying to track him down after Jack had let her walk in Sevogda two years earlier, but had decided against it, realizing that her presence might not be welcome in his life at this point.

She came to the edge of a concrete staircase and got as low as she could before she peered around the corner. People always expected to see someone at their eyelevel or above—never below. There was a guard at the base of the stairs. Irina flattened herself against the wall and fished the silencer from a pocket in her jacket, screwing it soundlessly onto the barrel of her gun.

Closing her left eye, she took aim at the guard's temple where his head was bent over his magazine, and squeezed the trigger. She closed her right eye and waited until she heard his body slump, then teeter off the chair on its slide to the floor. His magazine hit the floor with a flutter of pages and she took a quick look. He was slouched over, his eyes still open and his brain matter sprayed on the wall behind him. Irina winced, ever so subtly; the fine lines at the corners of her eyes deepened for a split-second, no more. She wondered, briefly, if she was getting soft in her old age; the sight of blood had never bothered her before.

Not even Sydney's.


	32. Chapter 32

Alone in his office, Jack poured over records of bank statements, phone call logs, and travel itineraries from the previous two months. No one was beyond suspicion. Most likely, though, the mole would be someone they least suspected.

Jack had no tolerance for moles. There was a measure of difference, he thought, between working as a double agent and being a mole. Being a double required at least a grasp of two organizations, the skill to serve two masters at once. A certain… _delicacy_ was necessary. On the other hand, a mole was a coward: someone who took money for covert activity but who didn't have the guts to actually break out and work actively against the organization they worked for.

The clock on the wall clicked over to 9 PM. Jack frequently worked late, long after the other agents had been released from their 9-to-5 office appearances. Those agents without field duties, mostly the injured, the untrustworthy, or the newbies, had fairly routine schedules; their days consisted of reading briefs on existing or emerging threats to national security, reviewing incoming intel, and the like. The agency's culture was far different than SD-6's had been, Jack mused. The CIA was a picnic compared to the field training ops that the Alliance had devised for its operatives. Sydney had had a hard time adjusting to the rigid bureaucracy of the agency, having been used to being largely autonomous, designing her own missions at Sloane's behest, with Dixon at her side.

This was, perhaps, Jack's largest problem with Vaughn. He mistrusted his son-in-law's ability to grasp what it was like, to work as a double agent, to be a field operative. After all, what had Vaughn been, before Sydney had fallen into his lap? A desk officer, non-field rated, someone who had entered the service to chase some memory of his deceased father, with some naïve notion of avenging his honor? Jack had tried to get Sydney reassigned to a different handler when she had first become a double. He had met Vaughn before, around the office, and had been… unimpressed. Vaughn hadn't made a bad impression, per say, he had just failed to make a good one on Jack. He was… forgettable. Still, he and Sydney managed to hide whatever attraction they had for each other from Jack, until that mission with Irina to reacquire the suitcase nukes that SD-6 had stolen.

_The cargo plane dipped and shuddered as it climbed out of Dover Airfield, en route to India. They were already dressed in tactical gear, and Sydney was trying valiantly to screw the stubborn cap of a flashlight back on after replacing its batteries. She finally got it threaded correctly and clicked it on, illuminating her face from under her chin for the briefest second before she turned it off. _

"_Agent Vaughn has trouble sleeping," Irina said, studying her daughter, "When you're in the field." _

_Sydney's eyes had betrayed her surprise when her mother said his name, but she looked away quickly and said, with a small shake of her head, "I doubt he told you that." _

_Jack just stared at Irina, unsure of her motive for saying something like that at a time like this._

"_He didn't have to tell me, I could see it in his eyes," Irina said certainly, "And I can see it in yours." _

_Sydney just stared at her mother, her eyes narrowing in what appeared to be disgust, "Agent Vaughn is my… colleague," she said._

"_You're so willing to take risks for your country," Irina forged on, despite the uncomfortable vibe that was developing, "Why aren't you willing to do the same for your own happiness?" _

_Jack couldn't listen any longer without interjecting, "I hardly think you've earned the right to give anyone relationship advice."_

_"Jack," Irina chided him, "Sydney's smart, and she's strong, but she's not happy." _

"_Ok!" Sydney mumbled something, trying to stop the conversation, but Jack was infuriated. _

"_And after a twenty-year absence, you've gleaned that from a cumulative half-hour you've spent in her presence?" He couldn't believe what he was hearing from his former wife. _

"_I knew it from the moment I saw her," Irina insisted, "I'm her mother—"_

"_Your motherhood, which is a biological fact, and has no substantive value in Sydney's life—"_

"_Hey!" Sydney fairly yelled at them. "Stop baiting him," she said to Irina, then looking to Jack, "And stop being such an easy target.__i__" _

At the time, Jack had been mentally kicking himself for not seeing something that Irina apparently found completely obvious to even the most casual of onlookers. Then he'd gotten angry at Vaughn, who still had a civilian girlfriend the entire time he was apparently pursuing Sydney on the side. This, when Sydney had risked her very life carrying out badly-designed ops for the CIA, when she had arranged to deliver Sloane to Sark so Sark could kill him to secure the antidote to the virus that was killing Vaughn, when—

_Stop_, Jack commanded himself. He could feel his blood pressure rising. This wasn't finding the mole. It was just making him more upset about Sydney's disappearance.

The list of frozen offshore accounts was lengthy, and growing day by day as the agency put holds on the assets of foreign nationals within the US. Recent re-activations were categorized separately, in a subsection on a subsequent page. Jack sped-read the list, waiting for one to look familiar.

Three pages later, there was still nothing. Jack sighed.

Suddenly, one account in the list caught his eye.

P. Garo, account number 311197847. It had been reactivated two months earlier, on May 17. Account balance: $185, 229, 100.40.

Peter Garo. It was one of Sark's aliases. He had used the mole to reopen his account that was frozen when he was taken into CIA custody nearly three years ago, the one that had remained frozen when he'd escaped their custody.

Jack closed his eyes and clenched his teeth together. Where had the money come from? That was an obscene amount of money.

The re-activations were traceable to the user accounts within the agency. The user ID for the individual who had authorized the change to the status? "jdfrankl".

Franklin? That little shit, Jack thought, gathering the papers and his gun from his desk drawer. He was going to pay the agency's closet case a personal visit.

* * *

Anastasia had left them alone again, and they sat in uncomfortable silence. Sydney's headache was beginning to subside, though hunger was beginning to make her irritable. Despite her vows from just that morning that she would never touch food again, she was quickly becoming ravenous.

"Sydney," Sark's voice finally cut the quiet air. "What are you thinking?"

"That I'm hungry."

"Oh."

"Why, what are you thinking?" she was curious now.

"I was wondering if my horses are all right," he replied, shrugging. "I haven't exactly made provisions as to their well-being if I were to disappear again for any length of time."

"We're going to get out of here," she said, silently wondering at how he could care so much for animals and simultaneously have so little regard for human life or companionship.

Sark just nodded.

"Sark," she said, suddenly curious, "How did you know I was pregnant? The ops reports are on a secure server, remote from the field office in LA."

His lips parted slightly in amusement, and a dimple formed on one cheek. "I have my ways."

She rolled her eyes, "Bullshit. How did you hack in without anyone knowing?"

"No one knew because _I_ didn't," he replied smoothly.

"What do you mean, _you_ didn't," her eyes narrowed in suspicion. She hated his whole cryptic routine. Why couldn't he ever just come out and answer her questions?

"It would be a pitiful mistake to believe that I haven't been building assets these past few years, Sydney," he said, in his supremely bored tone that made her want to slap him silly. "Just because you didn't know what I was up to doesn't mean that nothing was going on."

She stared at him, veil of rage beginning to cloud her thinking. "What do you mean, 'assets'? Money? Operatives? Contacts, what?"

He smiled, or rather, smirked with amusement at her obvious disgust. She wanted to kill him.

She was getting angry, he could see it in the set of her mouth, the way her eyes were hardening with every exchange. He loved to piss her off. It was one of the few pleasures he found in work these days.

"How do you suppose your new batch of university recruits found out about the footage from the bug that was in your VCR?" he let his right eyebrow arch. "That was dead and buried in the CIA archives. They just needed to know where to look."

"You sick…" her brow folded between her eyebrows as she looked to the side and searched for a word that could possibly match her disgust with him, "I cannot believe you."

"Why?" Her moralistic tendencies were beginning to make him annoyed.

"One of them is working for you? Which? All of them?" She was starting to speak really quickly in a half-whisper, the way she always did when she was furious.

"You overestimate my ambitions, Sydney, why use four when one is enough to do the job," he smiled just to enrage her further.

She closed her open mouth and nodded like she'd heard it all before. Stared at the floor a little, thinking about it. "The video box," she said, slowly, looking at him out of the tops of her eyes without raising her head, "That was your doing, wasn't it."

"A bit crass, I admit, but effective nonetheless," he continued smiling. "The agency really ought to reconsider its payroll structure. It favors the wayward actions of cash-strapped young men with secrets to keep."

"Where did you get the money to pay an operative? I thought the Covenant took all your money," she said, obviously suspicious of his claims.

"The Covenant made a small error in my favor by promoting Lauren and I to be heads of the North American cell," he said, feeling a small glimmer of pride in their teamwork, even now, "Which meant I was in charge of managing the funds allocated to carrying out the Covenant's agenda there."

"Which you carefully allocated to yourself," she finished for him. "What about Lauren?"

He shrugged, "She was due a portion of it, at least—we had planned to divvy up the money between us, but Vaughn's killing her took care of my needing to share with her."

* * *

Episodes: 

i Passage, Part I. Season 2, Episode 8. Written by Debra J. Fisher & Erica Messer.


	33. Chapter 33

Jack drove, his left hand clamped around the steering wheel of the 2002 Grand Marquis, his right foot solidly on the gas pedal. LA's freeways were clear this time of night, and Jack drove as if he were OJ with the entire LAPD hot on his tail. Franklin lived further out than he would've expected; he felt like he was driving to China.

At last he pulled to the curb on a residential street outside what appeared to be a house subdivided into several residences. Glancing at the file he had in his hand to double check the address, Jack strode to the front door and pressed the buzzer for 1B. He could see there was a light on in one of the downstairs apartments.

After several minutes with no response, Jack left his thumb on the button without pause until Franklin's bewildered voice crackled through the vintage intercom system, "Who's there? What?"

"Agent Franklin, this is Lead Agent Bristow," he said, more calmly than he really felt, "I need to have a word with you."

"Now?" came Franklin's whiny voice.

"Yes," Jack said, "Now."

The door buzzed and Jack opened the door into the foyer of the house and located 1B. It was Franklin's light he had seen from the outside—the coward was hiding from him. Just as Jack raised his hand to knock, the door opened a crack and Franklin's eye peeked out through it, several inches above the chain, which was firmly in place. The smell of patchouli wafted out into the hallway, and Jack resisted the urge to make a face in disgust. Awful.

"So, um, what's going on," Franklin asked, "Is there some emergency?"

"Yes, but it would be better if I could step inside to discuss a matter pertaining to national security, don't you think?"

"Oh, sorry," Franklin muttered, and the door closed for a second. Jack heard the chain come off the door, and he also heard Franklin check his gun before he opened the door. Jack stepped to the side and drew his own gun from his holster under his trench coat. The door opened next to him.

"Agent Bristow?" Franklin made the amateur mistake of poking his head out of his door to look for his unexpected caller, and Jack felt a small amount of pride glowing in his chest as the butt of his gun connected with Franklin's temple.

"Age will outwit youth and beauty every time," Jack muttered to himself as he dragged Franklin's limp body into the apartment and shut the door with a kick of his foot.

* * *

"Would you really have split the money with Lauren?" Sydney didn't believe it for a second.

He studied her for a moment before replying, "I'm sure the percentages wouldn't have been equitable, given that it was my money in the first place, but Ms. Reed did deserve to be paid for the… services that were rendered during her time with the Covenant."

Sydney pressed her lips together, thinking of what he could possibly mean by "services." She decided not to ask. Just as quickly as she had felt some tiny sliver of appreciation for his presence, he had managed to reverse that to more than a small feeling of irritation. She loathed the uneven, emotional rollercoaster she always seemed to be on when she was around him. It had always been this way; one minute he was like her annoying but lovable little brother, the next she wanted to scratch his eyes out. This was the longest she'd ever been around him, continuously, besides those maddening few weeks when he was working with SD-6 and she'd had to pretend like she didn't despise him with every hair on her head. Even more so, since it was her doing that had brought them together. More than once, she'd only been able to save her sanity during briefings, to keep from jamming her pen into his windpipe when he wouldn't stop staring at her, by holding her breath until she felt as though she might pass out before she allowed herself to breathe again.

Even to this day, she wondered what he had meant in Paris when he'd warned her that he and Lauren had a certain "reputation." What could possibly have been so unique or interesting about the woman's sex act on that people would have actually wanted to watch? She'd found Lauren to be fairly bland; that is, bland when she wasn't being an evil double-crossing spy bitch, anyway. Lauren was exactly the type of girl she supposed most guys liked: slender, blonde, smart, but not smart enough to actually threaten the man's sense of superiority.

_Woman was God's second mistake_, the Nietzsche quote flashed through her mind. Sark had used it as a pass phrase for a server they'd been trying to hack once.

"Are we done playing twenty questions about my financial status," Sark's amused tone cut into her thoughts. His blue eyes smiled even though his lips were set in a grim line.

"Which of them is your asset?" she returned to the subject of the mole.

"A young gentleman by the name of Jonathan Franklin," Sark said, smoothly. "He's more capable than the agency gives him credit for, though he is fairly unimaginative in his ministrations."

She sighed. Franklin… the kid had never even had a chance. Her father would dispatch him unceremoniously to the next life when he unraveled what he'd done. There would be a phone call to his mother in North Carolina, the "regret to inform you blah blah duty to his country blah blah blah honorable citizen blah blah beloved friend" conversation.

"How did you meet?"

Sark chuckled, "I was unrelated business in LA, having a drink at the hotel bar, when I was approached by Mr. Franklin." Sark's left cheek was dimpling with the smile that was playing at his lips. "Apparently I am as attractive to the same sex as I am to the opposite."

"Don't flatter yourself, it's not becoming," she sneered, feeling sorry for Franklin that he would try to pick up a deranged, sociopathic nutcase like Sark. When she was done feeling sorry for Closet Homo Newbie, maybe she would start feeling sorry for herself, too. Or maybe not, since self-pity might actually involve acknowledging that there was a certain—she hated the very word--chemistry between them.

"I'm sure most men wouldn't consider the advances of another man terribly flattering," he replied calmly, "Franklin is a handsome enough type… He's just not my type," Sark shrugged.

He was doing it, again—baiting her into asking him questions because her curiosity would get the better of it. _Well, screw him_, she thought. She was putting her curiosity into a lockbox—no, make that a Lockbox—like the one Al Gore had had for Social Security during his 2000 campaign.

But slowly, her insane curiosity found a way to pick the lock, maybe saw it off with a hacksaw, even, and she heard herself asking out loud, as though the voice came from another body besides hers, "And what would your type be, huh? I didn't know they made an 'Evil Blonde Double Agent' blow-up doll."

"Sydney, really, you wound me," he said with fake pout, "You must think me incapable of affection, which I assure you, I'm not." His blue eyes glittered with his amusement, she supposed at her curiosity. "I enjoy a certain… challenge in my pursuits. Even Ms. Reed did not succumb immediately to my charms, despite her boredom with Vaughn. I was surprisingly fond of her by the time she met her death at his hand. Really, you ought to thank me—had it not been for our partnership, she might still be married to Vaughn."

* * *

Franklin's eyes opened, slowly. His temple and the right side of his face, near his ear, were one solid mass of pain. It reminded him of getting hit with a lacrosse stick at prep school. Then he remembered how he had come to feel this way.

"Good, you're awake," Agent Bristow said, from his seat across from him. They were seated at Franklin's kitchen table, but Franklin noticed with growing alarm that he was duct-taped in several places to the chair. This could only mean one thing. And it wasn't a good thing.

"Yes?" Franklin croaked. "Why am I taped to the chair?"

"I would hate for you to be distracted while we discuss this matter," Jack threw the report containing account re-activations across the table in Franklin's general direction. "Who gave you permission to reactivate this account?"

"No one," Franklin mumbled.

"Then why did you do that?" Agent Bristow's tone was completely condescending.

Franklin shrugged.

"Do you know whose account this is?" Jack's eyes narrowed in suspicion.

"No," Franklin decided sarcasm was an appropriate response. This guy had had it in for him since the second he'd stepped into the Ops center 6 months ago. "I pulled a name out of a hat."

Agent Bristow's fist slammed down on the table, causing Franklin to jump as much as his tape restraints would allow. "Tell me… who you're working for," Jack's voice was low, savage.

"I reactivated it for Mr. Sark," Franklin said, quickly rethinking his prior impertinence, but also thinking back to that fateful night. If he just played it cool, not acted on his impulse to walk over to the tall, slender gentleman with hair the color of new straw, the one whose accent he'd heard as he'd ordered a glass of red wine, he would not be sitting here taped to the chairs his parents had bought him as a graduation gift.

"Very good," Agent Bristow said, now sarcastic himself. "Why?"

Why. Oh, why? Suddenly the money didn't seem as important as it had when he had made the first deal with Sark. What had he earned now, twenty-five g's? Sure, it was more than three quarters of his annual salary, a nice supplement with his student loans, but he had a sneaking suspicion he might not need to worry about his debt, wherever he was going.

"I… He paid me," Franklin said. It was his own fault for telling a perfect stranger what he actually did for a living.

"So does this country," Agent Bristow was clearly unsympathetic to his cause.

* * *

Franklin was on the verge of sniveling, Jack could see it. The kid's eyes were wide, his pupils dilated nearly to the edges of his irises. "Your actions," Jack continued, "May have compromised a long-term effort to apprehend and incarcerate one of the most elusive terrorists in recent memory." Perhaps he was giving Sark a little too much credit there, but he wanted Franklin to sweat. "And you expect me to believe that you were motivated merely by _money_?"

"Agent Bristow, I—"

"You _what_?" Jack narrowed his eyes. "What explanation can you possibly offer for this, this… disgrace? Because of your little arrangement, Mr. Sark is now able to fund his operations. Just why did you join the agency, if not to stop just exactly something like this from happening?"

Franklin looked down at his lap, at the table, basically anywhere except at Jack. Jack glowered and folded his fingers neatly together on top of the folder containing the records. He had stopped himself just short of going on a tirade about how Franklin had enabled Sark to wreck Sydney's personal life as well.

"I didn't know it would be this big a deal," Franklin said at last, lamely. "I didn't know it would be a repeat thing. I mean, one thing lead to another, and…" He closed his mouth and was silent. "My family doesn't know… about… they think I'm—"

"If you were having trouble dealing with being in the closet," Jack interjected, "You could've talked to any number of capable psychologists that the agency employs for just these purposes. They're very adept at dealing with the issues of employees who lead double lives."

Franklin's gaze snapped up to meet Jack's in surprise, probably because he thought no one at the agency knew about his preferences.

"Yes, we know about that," Jack confirmed, averting his eyes for a second, "Though the agency generally employs the don't-ask-don't-tell policy when it concerns such matters."

"I meant, Sark said he would tell my family," Franklin stammered, "When I met him, I thought he—"

Jack glowered even more, and Franklin stopped speaking in midsentence.

"There is no way to excuse your rogue behavior, Agent Franklin," he said. A tiny voice nagged him that he was being too hard on the kid, when he had overlooked exactly the same type of behavior for Sydney. Franklin didn't know that, though. He got up, casually almost, and went into Franklin's kitchen. He began opening drawers and rummaging through them, in search of an implement.

* * *

Stepping over the body of the guard she'd just shot, Irina tried not to notice the bright, coppery scent that hung in the air, not to see the spatters of blood bright red with oxygen, the tiny chips of bone. It smelled like a new penny, a scent that Irina still hated after all these years. To her, the coins smelled like blood. Steeling herself, she placed her hand on the doorknob, silently grateful that she'd remembered to bring gloves so that she wouldn't have to touch the slippery wetness of the metal coated with bodily fluids, feel it slip under her fingers as she struggled to turn the stiff mechanism.

Closing her eyes for a second, she tried to see something else in her mind's eye besides the pulpy, bloody mess that was the guard's head next to her on the chair. When had she ever been bothered by the sight of gore before now? She couldn't understand why she was suddenly so sensitive—not even when she was undercover, married to Jack with a baby at home, had she hesitated to pull the trigger or draw a knife across someone's throat, feel it catch a little as it cut the cartilage in their windpipe.

A voice danced in Irina's mind, as she slipped through the doorway to the next hallway, one that was lit only by a single buzzing fluorescent tube, a voice that whispered, _you're too late this time, there's nothing you can do. _

She moved cautiously down the hall and ignored the voice. She couldn't tell if she was more upset at the thought that one of them might be harmed, or that it was her negligence in keeping tabs on Anastasia's whereabouts that had lead to this. If there was one thing she knew certainly, it was that when she was 18, she hadn't seen this in her future. She didn't know what she had seen, but it wasn't this. Most people her age had a few grandchildren, were thinking about retiring, maybe moving to the country. She had failed to imagine anything for herself besides what was put in front of her, and now…


	34. Chapter 34

Sark was rather enjoying this mission, aside from the fact that he was strapped to a chair with no current plan of escape. He'd gotten out of worse; he'd get out of this, too. His confidence in his own ability was supreme. Sydney was clearly growing annoyed with being stuck in the same room with him for this long—it was, after all, the longest amount of time they'd spent in each others' presence.

"I will never thank you for any of the things you've done to the people I care about," she said, her voice low and even. "How dare you even suggest that I owe you some kind of… gratitude, or that I should believe you actually care about my feelings."

He shrugged casually, and looked to the floor. "We can't exactly undo what's already been done, Sydney," he said obviously, not feeling a trace of guilt. "You and I are different that way—I don't spend a lot of time thinking about the past."

"Oh, so that's it, then," she shot back, "I'm a charity case who lives in the past, huh? Well, at least I have a past to look back on that doesn't keep me awake at night."

"Oh, really? Which part doesn't keep you awake? The part where you bargained for someone to be killed to save someone you cared for? The part when you willingly mislead your own partner about your allegiance to better suit your own nee—"

"Like you're so much better!" she spat at him, "How can you pass judgment on me, you murdering, lying sonuvabitch!"

"I, unlike _you_, do not harbor any illusions that one of us is better or worse, and your stubborn persistence in doing so is illogical at best," Sark said calmly, "Why is it so difficult for you to admit that we're alike, you and I? To just acknowledge that you lie, murder and steal just the same as I do?"

"Why do you need for us to be the same?" she replied stubbornly. "What's the matter, is it lonely on your ice planet, Sark? Do you need a friend?" She let her lower lip roll out in a mock pout, and parroted the voice of a saccharine grade-school teacher, "'Poor Julian, he doesn't have any friends to play with in his little sociopathic universe.'"

"Like I said, Sydney," Sark deliberately kept his voice even, "I don't need anything from you. Between the two of us, you are the needy party. What was it that Joseph Conrad wrote? 'I only know that he who forms a tie is lost. The germ of corruption has entered into his soul.'"

"Oh, God!" she rolled her eyes at him, "Seriously, what is wrong with you? Why do you have to be different than everyone else? Why can't you just admit you need other people, too? Surely in your short, twisted life there's been someone that you were sorry to see go, someone you missed a teeny-tiny bit—c'mon, think about it—it's not like we're in a hurry!"

He stared at her, silent. Her hysteria was beginning to make him doubt himself, just a little. Maybe there _was_ something wrong with him? Was it really that unnatural to be so independent of human attachment—she certainly seemed to think so.

"I'm afraid that's need-to-know information," he said coolly.

"I'm afraid you're totally full of shit," she replied without so much as a second's pause.

How could he ever say it? Like saying it aloud would make it real—that he felt an illogical, inexplicable connection to… _her_, he always had, even before he'd known her. That night in Moscow, when he'd seen her dangling outside the window of the warehouse in that ridiculous fur hat, it was like seeing someone from another life, someone he had known. Even though he hadn't glimpsed her for more than a second, he had _known_ somehow it was Irina's daughter, her sainted eldest child that she'd left behind in the US. But to say it out loud to her—it was like something a crazy person would say.

_To you_, he said in his mind, _and only to you_.

* * *

It had been his seventeenth birthday, not that it had really meant much to him. His birthdays had always passed unmarked at school; why should it be any different now that he was working for her? And what was a birthday, anyway—age was just a number that some people attached unnecessary meaning to that had little to no bearing on one's maturity or capabilities. Boarding school had proved this theory beyond a doubt for him.

He was slouched in the worn leather armchair across from her at her big wooden desk, bouncing one foot just to annoy her. She hated that he did that out of nervousness, but he hated it when she summoned him only to ignore him while she continued working in his presence. He considered them even.

She was writing, writing, writing something endlessly in a bound book on her desk, and while he waited for her to speak, he cautiously looked at the pictures on her desk. There was one of her with her two sisters, Katya and Elena, when they were all younger. Even in that snapshot, one could see that Irina was the most mischievous of the three. Elena bore the stern, pinched look of an eldest child, and Katya's round face was serene, the ever-calm, even-tempered middle child. Next to that photo was a picture of her parents, black and white in an oval frame.

Then he noticed a photo, curled with age, lying at Irina's elbow. Nonchalantly as possibly, more as if he were shifting in the chair than craning to see it, he took a quick look, but she caught him red-handed.

"Yes?" Irina paused in writing without lifting the pen from the paper.

"Nothing."

Without a word she pushed the photo across the surface of the desk towards him. He grasped it by the edges and looked at it carefully. It was an early color photo, one whose colors had not held up well over time. A little girl squinted in the sun, her chubby cheeks puffed up in what Sark supposed was a smile, though it looked more like a grimace. He would've grimaced too, had he been forced to wear a little yellow skirt with matching yarn ties for pigtails, along with a frilly, high-necked white blouse that was smocked across the bodice. She was alone in the picture, though he could discern the shadows of two people in front her; her parents?

"Is that you?" he asked, knowing that it wasn't.

"No," Irina said fondly, taking the picture back from him gently. Her face looked the softest he'd ever seen it as she gazed at the picture for a second before placing it back where it had been. "It's my daughter."

"Oh," was all he could think to say at first. He had never considered the possibility that she might be a mother herself. "Where does she live?"

"In America. With her father," Irina replied without looking up.

"How old is she?" He found himself suddenly, insatiably curious about her by virtue of knowing nothing.

"In the picture, or now," Irina asked without pausing in her writing.

He shrugged, "Either one."

She paused and glanced up at him before continuing to write. "That picture was taken when she was 4. She's going to be 23 next month."

Sark accepted this without comment. So, she was somewhat older than him. "Do you see her?"

"No," Irina sighed deeply, "They believe I died, when she was 6. I haven't seen her since then."

"Do you miss her? What about her father?"

"Sometimes." He wasn't clear from her answer if she meant her daughter, or the girl's father, or both? He sat forward in the chair, waiting for her to continue. At last, she stopped writing and placed the cap on the pen carefully before putting the picture in the center desk drawer and closing it. She folded her hands on the desk and studied him.

"Julian," she addressed him, "There are times in this business when you have to choose what master to serve. You have to be flexible, and remember, sometimes truth takes time."

He nodded like he understood, but he didn't, not at the time. Later, when she was out of the house, he'd returned back to the desk to look for the picture, but it was gone, and the memory of the little girl's face was already imperfect in his memory. He didn't even know her name.

* * *

Nearing the end of the hall, Irina could make out the edge of yet another staircase. Where did this building lead? It was like a maze. She moved silently, walking heel-to-toe in a half-walk, half-jog gait that covered slightly more ground. At the corner she sank again to one knee and peered around, low to the ground. Again, a single guard outside the door; Irina was beginning to wonder at the ease of this job. Her instincts were telling her it was too easy to be true. Nothing in this business ever went this easily.

She was checking the magazine on her gun when she heard a noise from the bottom of the stairs. It sounded like… voices? She glanced quickly around the corner and saw the guard glance over his shoulder at the door, shrug, and shake his head a little. Irina held her breath and listened, listened so hard and so still that even the sound of her own heartbeat seemed loud in comparison.

There it was again—the sound like voices. There were high notes, a woman's voice, no doubt, and then the low murmurings of a male voice too low to make out. She couldn't understand what they were saying, but it didn't matter. Relief shot through Irina's limbs like the burn of alcohol on a cold winter's night—it was _them_. They were alive. They were OK; hell, it even sounded like they were arguing. Imagine that.

Irina smiled as she whipped around the corner and shot the guard blatantly in the forehead.

* * *

It was cold in LA after dark, even in the late summer, and Vaughn felt the goose bumps on his forearms under his dress shirt. Glancing at his watch, he discovered he'd been sitting outside for several hours longer than he had intended.

Actually, there had been no intention; he'd come home from work, shrugged off Weiss's attempts to get him to go out or at least come over for a drink, and had walked out here to get…_something_ when he'd sank down on this deck chair and not moved since. A light breeze had come up, but he'd stayed seated, just thinking. Just breathing. It was all he could do right now. There was no script for this kind of stuff. He knew people were starting to wonder where Sydney was; they were starting to approach him with that same look they got after they thought she had died, that, "Hey, man, how're _things_," the question he thought he'd go crazy from having to answer for the hundred millionth time. _I'm fine. It's all fine. _

Looking at the orange glow of the sky over downtown, Vaughn wondered if there was one moment when this could all have been avoided. There were, of course, plenty that sprang to mind. He could've said he was busy when Director Devlin had stepped into his crowded little office and asked if he could process the Agency's latest walk-in. Could've asked to have been replaced as her case officer—he wasn't qualified anyway, but she _liked_ him for some strange reason, even when her skills were so beyond his.

No wonder the terrorists were winning the war on terror, he thought, their agents were ten times as skilled as the CIA's ever were.

More moments: could've stashed his father's wristwatch that broke that fateful day—October 1— somewhere in a drawer and never showed it to her, never told her that ridiculous story about how you could set your heart by the watch and how it had stopped the day they met. He cringed now, sitting in the chair, thinking about it. Could've ignored her big brown eyes and just concentrated on working things out with Alice. Alice was a _nice_ girl, the kind you took home to Mom. For God's sakes, she even got squeamish about touching raw meat and stuff like that. She was, in a nutshell, everything that Sydney was not.

Moment Number He'd Lost Track of Its Number: when Will had threatened him in the post office about hurting Sydney's feelings, he could've heeded the warning. But… no. Curiously, Will's admonishment had made him bolder, made him even more convinced that they could somehow work things out between them.

Could've resisted Weiss's advice to ask her out to dinner when they were on a counter mission in France, could've not told her that endearing but idiotic story about why his code name was Boy Scout.

He could've sat there all night, thinking of ways to have avoided his sitting there thinking of all those scenarios.

But no amount of thinking about it would turn back the clock to any of them, any of those moments—what was done was done. It almost made him believe in destiny—in the inevitability of their course in life. If being with her was his fate, though, where was the moment he could've stopped things from leading to… _this_.

He couldn't think of a single one.


	35. Chapter 35

"What's the matter, cat got your tongue?" she asked cruelly. "You've never been at a loss for words before."

"Perhaps I would be more loquacious if we were discussing a topic which didn't bore me to tears," Sark replied, "Why are you so insistent on pursuing this one inane subject—surely there's something else of interest about me to you."

"It only interests me because you're so obviously avoiding—" Sydney froze and listened. She'd heard something outside the door.

"What?"

"Shhh!" she whispered, "Listen."

They each held their breath in time to hear a muffled sound, like a sack of flour being dumped unceremoniously on the floor, shortly followed by a jingling sound, as if the tiniest sleigh in the world had been parked outside the door to the room.

Their eyes met as someone inserted a lock in the keyhole.

The door swung open and they breathed a collective sigh of what Sydney supposed was relief when Irina peered cautiously around the edge of the door before opening it fully and entering the room.

"Mom?" she exclaimed, "What are you doing here?"

Irina glanced between them without saying anything as she started undoing Sark's bonds first. "As soon as I knew you were both looking for Anastasia, I had a bad feeling," she explained tersely. "It looks like my hunch was right—are you all right?"

"Relatively speaking," Sark mumbled.

"Sydney?" Irina looked at her hard, "Are you OK?"

"Mom, I'm fine," she said, "I think this was all to draw you here—it has nothing to do with Sark or me, really."

Irina made no comment, but moved to untie Sydney's hands and Sark knelt next to her legs, working the knot out of the cord binding her ankle to the chair.

"We need to get out of here," Irina said, her voice low, "I've shot four guards, getting in here was too easy. Sydney—"

Sydney felt her mother's hand on the back of her head, and she had a sudden vivid memory of Irina's hand on her forehead as she stood hunched over the toilet, vomiting from the flu. She could almost see the tile in her parents' bathroom, smell Irina's perfume as she held Sydney's hair out of the way with her free hand.

"There's blood in your hair," Irina said, "Are you sure you're all right?"

"She's fine," Sark snapped, "Did you get the guns from the guards? We're not armed."

"I told you—" Irina straightened up and pointed her finger at Sark, "I told you to leave her out of this. Of course I got their guns."

Sark ignored her admonishment and said, "We can't change what's already done, so how about we just get the hell out of here? My mother apparently has a bone to pick with you, so it would behoove you to move just a bit faster."

Sydney struggled free as her restraints fell slack and stood up quickly. A wave of nausea swept over her and she inhaled sharply, hoping a deep breath of…well, not fresh air, but air would calm her churning midsection. She was salivating like a rabid dog, and she knew she was dangerously close to vomiting.

"Are you going to make it," Sark grimaced as he looked at her, "Perhaps you could try for six times today—six is a perfect score in some Olympic sports, you know."

Sydney swallowed hard against the bile that was rising already in her throat and shook her head violently. She refused to give him the satisfaction of actually seeing her vomit, even if he did deserve to have her puke on his shoes.

"Take a deep breath, Sydney," Irina urged, placing her long, cool fingers on Sydney's forehead. "You're going to be alright, but we need to get out of here."

"You would leave without even saying hello to an old friend?"

They whirled around to see Anastasia, leaning against the doorframe, her arms crossed in front of her. Wells was just behind her, along with several other guards.

"Hello, Irina. It's been a long time."

* * *

"What are you gonna do with that," Franklin's eyes widened in horror as Jack seated himself again at the table with a potato peeler. He was growing more freaked out by the second. Jack had been rummaging in the drawer next to his block of knives for several minutes before he had found what he was apparently searching for.

"The common vegetable peeler," Jack began, "is an amazing instrument." He turned the stainless steel tool over in his hand, examining its construction. "You have a sharpened blade on each inside edge, so that the user can peel a vegetable's skin either towards—" he held his right index finger up like a carrot, "—or away from him."

Franklin's expression was one of frank horror. Jack was trying not to smirk.

"Then, here at the top," Jack used the same extended index finger to point at the little triangle-shaped curved blade at the tip of the peeler, "You have a tiny spade-shaped implement with which to gouge out the eyes of potatoes or other tuberous vegetables which have begun to sprout roots. Sometimes you can carve away enough of the bad that the good part of the potato is still usable."

Jack raised his eyebrow at Franklin. "You're like the root of a potato, Mr. Franklin. The agency can survive without you, but you cannot survive without your potato to leach nourishment off of."

"I… I don't understand," Franklin stammered, "Are you going to kill me with that thing?"

Jack glared at Franklin. "Would you like me to?"

"What kind of a question is that?" Franklin cried, "No—God, are you crazy? No!"

"Then I suggest you start at the beginning, and tell me everything about your dealings with Mr. Sark."

* * *

They stood in their little group, Sark and Sydney and Irina, watching as Anastasia sauntered into the room. Sark noticed that Anastasia was a little thinner than Irina, even.

"Bring us another couple of chairs," Anastasia commanded without turning her head. One of the guards scurried out and came back promptly with two more uncomfortable looking chairs. "We need to have a chat," she continued, looking between them. "That was very inconsiderate of you to kill my men, Irina," she chided, "Good help can be hard to find."

"Don't do this," Irina shook her head. "Let them go, they have nothing to do with this."

"What's the matter," Anastasia said in Russian, "Are you afraid they'll find out the truth about you?"

Sark glanced at Irina, then at Sydney. He had no idea what this was all about. Wells was certainly looking smug, leaning against the doorframe.

"Please, sit down," Anastasia beckoned towards the chairs. "We don't have to stand."

Irina looked mistrustfully at the chairs. It was, Sark noted to himself, the least sure he had ever seen Irina look.

"Leave us," his mother barked at the men standing near the door. "Good, now that we're alone, we can sort this out in peace."

As if directed by an invisible hand, he and Sydney sank down onto the chairs they had been bound to only seconds before. He noticed, for the first time, how uncomfortable the chairs actually were. Irina and Anastasia held each other's gaze without blinking, and at the same time, they bent folded their long bodies neatly onto the empty chairs, never looking away from the other. With a smug smile, Anastasia crossed her long, slender thighs and bounced the foot on her top leg, a nervous gesture that seemed like it belonged to a different body than the one that sat regally, impassively with its shoulders thrown back, chin up, the very posture of someone with the upper hand. It was a posture Sark was intimately familiar with.

"What is this," Irina said at last, in Russian. "If you wanted me, you could've found me without bringing them into it."

"Oh, but this little reunion is nice, don't you think?" Anastasia's voice was bordering on sarcasm. "We should've been able to do this…oh, about 6 years ago."

"That was the plan, yes," Irina conceded, "But you stopped making contact."

Sark caught Sydney's glare from between the two where they were arguing, and he couldn't read her eyes, except that she still seemed to be on the verge of being sick to her stomach. He had the paradoxical urge to laugh, to give in to hysterical laughter not unlike the spasms that had wracked him after she'd seduced him in his sister's house. Didn't some people say they had the urge to laugh at funerals? It was some weird human reaction, he decided.

"What do you mean, _I_ stopped? You quit answering my letters," Anastasia's foot bounced faster now. "Either way, I'm still entitled to my portion of the inheritance."

"What?" Sark couldn't stop his mouth from falling slightly open as he stared at Anastasia. "Is that what this is about? The money?"

"Darling," she fixed him with a tight-lipped smile that he could only interpret as condescending, "Doesn't it always come down to that?"


	36. Chapter 36

Sark stared at Anastasia a few moments longer before looking to Irina. What on earth did his crackpot mother mean, _Afraid they'll find out the truth about you?_

"Feel free to jump in at any point here," he said coolly.

"She's right," Irina said measuredly, "As your mother, she was due a small percentage of your inheritance."

"I suppose so," Sark replied with an affected shrug, "So what was in it for you, Irina? Why keep me around?"

He saw Sydney open her mouth slightly and then clamp it closed so hard the muscle in her jaw moved, back near her ear. Irina didn't know about his siphoning of funds from the Covenant—how could she, having been in their custody while it was going on? Apparently, Anastasia didn't know about the Covenant's theft, either. Of course—Wells's comment made sense now: _What does a dilettante like you need with ops work, with your fortune?_

"Julian," Irina's voice had that warning tone that had always given him pause before, but he forged ahead. Irina's hold over him had finally, suddenly run its course.

"No," his voice was firm, "I wouldn't expect anyone to have done a job and not be compensated properly for it. Would you?" He turned to Irina and he could see the astonishment in her brown eyes. "That's all it was, after all—a job. A few years of irritation for God and country in exchange for a nice little tidy payment?"

"Of course not," Irina insisted, "I kept you safe as a favor to Anastasia, and to keep you safe from Elena."

"Bullshit," Sark's laugh was brittle, "You had the same agenda, to bring the Rambaldi prophecy to fruition—you and Sloane both," he stopped short. "You would've killed me after I got the money anyway—you just needed to find Lazarey and kill him so his son could conveniently reappear to claim his rightful inheritance. Clearly, I was your cash cow," he finished in a huff. His sense of betrayal was beginning to glow in his chest, an ember in the ashes of a fire that catches a breath of air and begins to glow incandescent again.

"Say it isn't so," he challenged her, "Say it to my face, Irina. What a fool I was to think that you kept me close to you all those years because you felt some obligation to me, some pathetic misplaced maternal instinct. I should've known that if you'd up and leave your firstborn that something was amiss—"

"How dare you presume to know my motives," Irina finally verbalized, "I kept you because you were useful to me, you were a good operative—"

"Until you needed my money more than my skills!" Sark shouted over her, unwillingly to hear whatever excuse she might offer up. To his surprise, his voice broke a little on his final word. It was all so clear now, how could he not have put it together before? Give him up, keep him "safe" in CIA custody while she tracked down Lazarey, then extract him and kill him for his money. Except Elena had gotten to Lazarey via Sydney first, and captured Irina to keep her out of the way.

"Children!" Anastasia's laugh sang out above the fray, "Let's not let our feelings get in the way of business."

Sark and Irina turned to stare at Anastasia.

"I would be happy to get the money I was entitled to," Anastasia said agreeably. "There's no need to rehash the past here and now."

* * *

"Where're we going?" Franklin asked, after they'd been driving for several minutes in silence. Jack had the pedal to the metal, and his mouth was set in a grim line.

"Back to the office," Jack said tersely. They were going to see the director of CI. Franklin would no doubt be taken into custody. He would be safer there, anyway. They could re-freeze the account; maybe without funding Sark and subsequently, Sydney, would resurface.

Franklin nodded, wordless, and looked out the passenger window. Finally he said, "I don't think the money's in the account anymore."

Jack scowled momentarily before he barked, "What do you mean, it's not there anymore?"

"I mean—" Franklin looked stricken—"The times I've been paid, it wasn't out of the account from the bank in the Caymans, it was an untraceable account. He probably moved it as soon as it was unfrozen."

Jack took his eyes off the freeway momentarily to stare harshly at Franklin. He could see it in the kid's eyes that he wasn't lying.

_Fuck. _


	37. Chapter 37

"If money's all you're after, _Mom_," Sark said sarcastically, "I'd be happy to give you your portion of the nest egg."

Anastasia's blue eyes glittered with the idea of finally getting what she was due.

His plan was taking shape. "First of all, you need to let them go," he motioned with his head to Sydney and Irina, "And then we can discuss the transfer of funds to wherever you'd like."

"We're leaving together," Irina interjected, "I won't leave Julian behind."

"How noble of you," Anastasia sneered at her one-time friend, "Honestly, Irina, I wouldn't have expected you to turn out to be the more maternal of the two of us."

Sydney could barely believe her ears. Sark was going to willing turn over his money to Anastasia in exchange for their freedom? This was the kind of altruism you only read about in books. Very naïve books.

She could sense Irina's distrust of the situation, but she wasn't about to give them away. Whatever Sark had in mind, it was better than her plan, which was currently no plan at all. Irina's web of lies and betrayal was impenetrable to her. If Sark wanted to make sure she stayed alive, it was up to him.

"Get a pen," Sark said shortly, "Or have one of your lackeys get one. I'm giving you the account number, and you're going to loan us one of your cars so that we can drive ourselves back to civilization."

"How will we get the car back," Anastasia asked, and Sark wondered silently why someone who thought they were about to get a large sum of money was worried about losing a crappy town car. Then again, not everyone had had the benefit of working in the kind of organized crime syndicates he'd had the dubious pleasure of being part of in his short years on the planet.

Wells appeared at his shoulder with a pad of paper and a pen. Anastasia motioned him towards Sark and Sydney watched silently as he took them and wrote rapidly, in that same precise slanting cursive that had been on the hotel stationary, explaining at the same time. "The account doesn't have that much in it, but I assure you, it's more than enough to make you comfortable. Escort us outside, and you get the account number."

Anastasia nodded, and rose to her full height. "Follow me."

Up, past the dead bodies and out into the night they went; Sydney was mildly surprised to discover it was much later than she'd realized. She felt immediately better in the fresh air, like she could breathe all the way to the bottom of her lungs without the threat of vomiting. It was a welcome change.

Shortly, Wells pulled up with another nondescript sedan, smaller by far than the limo he and Wells had ridden to AMS Inc. in, but certainly adequate for the three of them.

"Get in," he said to Irina and Sydney, without taking his eyes from Anastasia. They glanced at each other, but did as he ordered. He creased the little piece of paper several times before handing it to Anastasia. "Well," he said with import, "It's been a pleasure doing business with you."

His mother flipped her long auburn hair over her shoulder and unfolded the paper long enough to glance at the account number. She nodded silently, and leaned forward as if to kiss him on the cheek, but he held up his hand between them. "Don't."

Without another word, he turned and climbed into the driver's seat of the sedan. Took one last glance at them, and then pulled the door shut with a muted _thump_.

* * *

Jack and Franklin hovered behind Agent Stevens as she accessed the bank records for Van der Zuiden Bank, Grand Cayman. Jack scowled and tapped his foot, as much impatience as he would allow himself to show.

"Well," Stevens said finally, "The account had several large withdrawals made back in late May and in early June, and there's a tiny balance left."

"How much?" Jack asked.

"Forty-seven dollars and forty-seven cents," Stevens scowled, "That's a really strange amount of money to leave in an account, don't you think?"

Jack ignored her comment and turned to Franklin. "I took the liberty of calling Director Chase before I stopped by your place. She's ready to talk to you now."

Franklin only nodded, and stuffed his hands in his pockets. One of the other newbies was working late at his desk, and Franklin gave him a short little wave as they walked past his workstation towards the administrative offices.

* * *

Sydney lay her cheek against the cool, fragrant leather in the back seat of the borrowed sedan and listened through the haze of her headache as Sark and her mother argued.

"We need to ditch the car somewhere," Sark interrupted Irina's tirade, "It's most likely equipped with a GPS tracker, we don't want them to catch up with us."

"Good luck getting a cab in this part of town," Irina said, "So what happens now? Where are you going to go with no money?"

"Why would you assume I have no money," Sark retorted, "Money is the least of my worries. You honestly think I would give them the number to an account that had liquid funds in it?"

"How much is in that account?" Irina demanded. "What makes you think they won't hunt you down when they discover it's not the goldmine they were after?"

Sark smirked, Sydney could see it in the rearview mirror. "I left it with a balance of forty-seven forty-seven," he said, glancing at Irina with a shrug. "For old times' sake."

Irina accepted this without comment and stared straight ahead out the windshield. They were nearing the city center.

"Hey," Sark said over his shoulder, "Are you going to make it back there?"

"I've survived worse," she mumbled. Irina turned then and knelt over the seat, first placing her hand on Sydney's forehead, then pressing her palm to her cheek. Irina smiled a little, and said, "You're going to be fine, sweetheart. You just get grouchy when your blood sugar gets low."

Abruptly, Sark pulled over and shut the engine off. "I think we should separate," he suggested. "It's harder to keep tabs on individual people than a small group."

"I'll go," Irina volunteered. "You need to take care of her," she looked hard at Sark, "Make sure she gets something to eat, and soon. Get out of the car for a minute," she ordered him.

He did as she asked, and when the door had shut behind him, Irina turned back to her. Sydney struggled up into a sitting position, propping herself up with one arm against the deep cushion of the back seat. Any change in her posture sent a wave of nausea through her. She forced herself to look at Irina, who obviously had something to say to her.

"You didn't get to talk to Vaughn, then," Irina began, "Jack says Sark double-crossed you on your arrangement."

"Mom," Sydney shook her head, "It's not worth discussing, we can't change what's done."

"I hope this is what you want, Sydney," she said slowly, "I can't pretend to understand your motivations, because this is not what I had hoped for you."

Sydney was suddenly acutely aware of how tired she was. Just… _tired_. Bone-tired. Like she could sleep for a week.

"I know, Mom," she whispered. A wave of curiosity overcame her, and she said, "Mom… you and Sloane, you were going to kill him, weren't you—he was right."

Irina just looked at her older child, her face an impenetrable mask of concern.

"Be safe," Irina said, stroking the side of her face. "You know I love you."


	38. Chapter 38

Sark leaned against the trunk of the car, his hands shoved in his pockets. It was chilly without a jacket, and he shivered a little in the light breeze. Sydney's words were still running through his head: _Destiny implies something good at the end, predetermination just implies a lack of choices._

_So, what now, _he thought_. What good is supposed to come of this…_

Just then, Irina's door opened and she came around to the rear of the car where he was standing. He stood at attention, no longer leaning on the car, but hands still in his pockets. Her stubborn refusal to deny his assessment of his worth to her only as a commodity in trade confirmed his suspicions beyond a shadow of a doubt, and an unexpected, indefinable sense of disappointment was blossoming slowly through him.

Irina peered at him for a long minute before speaking. "Julian," she said, "I don't want to leave things… on bad terms with you."

"Don't," he replied, his voice low, "Don't try to butter me up."

"You could've come to me for help, you didn't need Sydney to help you with this," Irina continued as if he hadn't spoken at all, "I still don't understand why you had to bring her into this."

"Consider us even, then," he shot back. He hesitated, feeling momentarily impertinent, and finally settled on saying, "Truth takes time, doesn't it."

Irina's lips twisted into a slow smile before she turned and walked slowly away from him, the heels of her shoes making a light clicking sound against the pavement. He stood, motionless, until she turned a corner and was out of sight.

* * *

She felt the car door open and heard Sark slide back into the driver's seat. She kept her eyes closed as started the engine, but opened them a crack when she heard him turn around to address her.

"Well?" was all he said.

"Well, what?" she snapped in return.

"I recall promising you a stay in a rather nice establishment to make up for our accommodations here in lovely Bucharest," he offered, but he sounded unsure. Very un-Sarklike of him.

"Oh," she said, "Right."

They rode in silence for awhile before she said, "I've never been to Chicago."

"Chicago?" she could hear the sneer in his voice. "As in Chicago in the middle western United States, Chicago?"

"Is there another?"

"I don't want to go to the Midwest," he sighed, "Pick somewhere else."

She propped herself up on one elbow and stared at the back of his blonde head. "Who said anything about you coming?"

There was a short silence before he ignored her comment and asked, "So what is there in Chicago?"

"Um… It's on Lake Michigan—that's one of the Great Lakes," she said.

"Oh, how could I forget," his voice was dripping with sarcasm. "I must've slept through that year in geography class at boarding school."

She ignored his snobbery and forged on, "It's second largest city in the US, and they have the tallest building in the world there."

He glanced at her in the rearview mirror before contradicting her, "No, I'm afraid those towers they built in Kuala Lumpur have surpassed even the Midwest's beloved Sears Tower. What else?"

"It's… They have…" she was grasping at straws to defend her spur-of-the-moment choice. "That painting, An American Gothic, is in their art museum. And there's a river?"

"If you've never been there, how do you know that painting is in their collection?"

She shrugged, sitting up all the way. "Random trivia fact."

"Chicago is beautiful in autumn, actually," he agreed with a shrug. "I suppose I could live with it if that's _really_ where you think want to go."

"Oh, so you've been there," she said. "Why didn't you just say that?"

"It's more fun to make you angry."

She reached up and flicked the top of his ear with her fingernail. He flinched and they swerved a little when her finger connected with the flesh and cartilage.

"Ow!" he protested, but not too much. "You must be feeling better, since you're being stroppy again."

She glowered in the back seat, feeling slightly insulted. "Wherever we wind up, we need to get something to eat first before I eat my arm."

"Yes, your highness, I know."

She reached up and flicked his ear again for good measure, but this time he didn't respond.


	39. Chapter 39

"Sydney, I swear, if you don't stop bending your wrist like that, I will break it for you so you can't!"

Her right wrist was crooked. Again. It was like she had no muscles. She was sweaty, could feel the river of sweat running down her back, under her bra. How long had they been at this?

"Better."

She licked her upper lip and tasted sweat, and dirt. Sometimes when she rode, the dirt collected on her upper lip, right below her nose. A dirt moustache, really lady-like.

She'd begged him to teach her to ride—Sark had tried to persuade her otherwise, saying he had no patience and had never taught anyone—but she wouldn't let it go, and finally he'd given in. They'd found a stable where his horses could come to live, near their places, and now he was her slave driver. He'd been wrong, of course, about not having any patience. He had infinite patience when it came to pointing out her flaws. Which were numerous.

"Higher with your hands, and keep them even—he won't go even if you don't keep steady contact on both reins."

She could see him, on the ground in the middle of the circle she was making, one that was more egg-shaped than round, walking a tiny circle with his head cocked to the direction they were headed, watching her every move.

"Oh, God--can we please walk?" she sighed, the horse easing into a swinging walk as if he'd read her mind. Eskimo was fairly sweated as well, though he seemed to have limitless energy whenever Sark sat on him. It was only when she rode him that he seemed to tire, to sweat.

"Yes, let him catch his breath." Sark's tone didn't imply any judgment at her decision. "He was in a good frame before you let him go." Like a moth to a flame, Eskimo ambled towards Sark to nudge him for a peppermint. She hated the way his breath smelled after he'd had one: like hay, rot and bit like Christmas.

"He's going to get cavities."

"He does need to see the dentist," Sark agreed, "Because his teeth are getting fairly long."

She didn't like watching the horse dentist. It was called 'floating', what they did to file the horse's teeth down. Maybe she'd had endured too much torture involving her teeth to be amused by the procedure.

"Alright, canter him each way before we stop—I don't want him thinking he gets off that easily," Sark ordered.

She sighed deeply and felt her stomach muscles threaten to cramp. She was in good shape—great shape, even—but this riding worked muscles she didn't even know she had. Her shoulders would be knotted for days. She was a masochist, truly.

"More walk- he can give you ten times that walk," Sark chided, "You want him to feel like he could jump over an 8-foot fence from a standstill, he's so ready to work for you."

She fluttered her calves in the general direction of the horse's ribcage and he perked up a little, chewing at the bit. A large glob of foamy, peppermint-scented saliva blobbed onto his front leg as he walked a little more energetically.

"Better, now canter."

Sydney forced herself to sit deep but tall at the same time, stretch her inside leg down and hold her hands steady as she slid her outside leg back. Eskimo swished his tail and stepped off into a bounding, springing canter. It was both her most and her least favorite gait. He was smooth, but he cantered so… what was the term they used? So 'big' that she felt like there was air between her butt and the saddle during the airtime of his stride.

"Nice transition, don't let him go too long before you go down to trot—he likes to stop listening to you when he gets going."

They cantered most of a full circle before she braced herself and leaned her weight back, not really pulling back like you always saw cowboys do in the movies, but rather stopping her momentum so that she wasn't moving forward with the horse's strides any longer.

Eskimo huffed indignantly but broke into a jaunting trot. They changed directions by making an S-shape through the circle, and she repeated the exercise to the left. Sark watched them wordlessly from the center of the circle, a rounder one now, his head still cocked. His arms were crossed and his expression was impenetrable to her, from what she could see in her peripheral vision.

"Alright, let him walk—you both need a bath," Sark smiled at last.

* * *

Her form was far more elegant than he let on; he didn't want her getting a big head and getting content. He was trying to train her at riding as ruthlessly as they'd been trained as operatives.

Sitting in traffic on the Edens into the city, he asked, "Your place or mine?"

The arrangement was fairly simple. They both lived in Chicago, though they each had their own places. They were both freelancers, but she was thinking of maybe going back to school, maybe getting her law degree. They had an unspoken understanding about each others' needs. They weren't dating, they weren't anything; they refused to give it any label, what they had together. They had grown milder with each other over the last couple of years, the stress of needing to brutalize each other somehow lessening. Not that they were 'normal' by any means; 'gentle' was generally understood to mean that no blood would be shed.

"Yours, I guess," she yawned. "You have the big bathtub."

He glanced at her as a junky black Civic cut them off. He honked and the driver of the Civic returned the honk. It was so weird that Chicagoans did that. Like back talking with the horn.

"Don't forget," she reminded him absently, "I need to go by the post office, too." A brown paper-wrapped package lay between them on the front seat. Sark didn't know what it was, it wasn't addressed yet.

"Right, I remember," he replied agreeably. He kind of liked doing mundane things with her. He'd never had anything like that with anyone.

"Are you sore?" He already knew the answer. She didn't have the muscles of a rider, not yet. She'd only been at this for a few months. She had her boots and socks off, one heel hitched up on the edge of the car seat. He decided not to point out what her sweaty feet were doing to the leather.

"I have sore muscles I didn't even know I had," she laughed. "Like this one that feels like it's underneath my shoulder blades?"

"You always have a knot there anyway," he agreed. "I'm sure riding didn't help."

She glanced at him before looking away, out the passenger window. "Yeah…" her voice trailed off.

* * *

They lay in the tub, him behind her, soaking in silence. After awhile, he started pressing his thumb into the knot she had complained about, along the edge of her right shoulder blade. She could feel the little lump of muscle move around under the pressure. It actually hurt so bad she had to grit her teeth a little. Sometimes he didn't realize the strength in his hands.

"Ow!" she yelped at last when she couldn't stand it anymore, "Save it for later, ok?"

He removed the offending thumb and moved his hand up to her shoulder, to the muscle that spanned between her shoulder and her neck. But then, he kept going so that his hand, wet with the now-tepid bath water, was turning her face towards him.

"Hi," she said softly, acutely aware of his other hand near her left breast.

"Hi yourself," he said, his eyes half open. He leaned his head forward and kissed the corner of her mouth, before she turned completely and met his eager lips full on. She let him shove his tongue against hers, so hard she could feel the pebbly texture of his taste buds, before she took his lip in her teeth and bit it, gently.

Without a word, he pushed her away—_get out of the tub_—and she didn't hesitate. They toweled off separately and ambled into his bedroom, unhurried. The window above the bed was open—he hated the air conditioning—and the warm, humid night city air was flowing in, moving the curtains a little.

The ends of her hair were still wet, dripping from the tub. She hadn't washed her hair, and she could still taste dried sweat and dirt on her lower lip. She knew he could, too.

She felt like the moment was the photo negative of their first time. Everything that was black, was white, and vice versa. No color. Just shades of grey. The only similarity was the heat, but even that was different: it was the dark, moist heat of a late summer night on the verge of fall instead of the roiling, stifling heat of a late afternoon.

She could feel the breath of autumn in the night air, the whisper of cold that had crept in off the lake. Soon the trees would be changing, dropping their leaves onto the still-green grass of the parks. It was her favorite season in this city.

As he eased on top of her, she closed her eyes and listened to the song on the stereo.

_The green autumnal parks conducting_

_All the city streets, a wondrous chorus_

_Singing all these poses, oh how can you blame me,_

_Life is a game, and true love is a trophy…__1_

_

* * *

_

To be gentle with her required so much concentration, it threatened his sanity. She lay still under him, and he could nearly feel her exhaustion from riding. He teased her, making her wait, but making sure she was ready, so as not to hurt her more. He could be considerate that way. He knew she wasn't terribly aroused by his foreplay. He kissed behind her ear, tasting the light salt of her dried sweat and the dirt from the barn, down the side of her neck, to the top of her shoulder, where he gently nuzzled her skin. She grimaced even at the light pressure—she was so sore that even touching the muscles made them hurt.

He drew back and shivered in the warm night breeze, though not from it. He reached down and pulled the sheet up, over them, like a tent.

"Sydney," he murmured her name against her neck, "Stay, would you?"

She nodded without opening her eyes. They didn't presume the other would actually stay to sleep, when they spent time together. Sometimes, though, it was nice to wake up next to someone.

* * *

Songs: 

1 "Poses." Poses, Rufus Wainwright.


	40. Chapter 40

"Hey, Vaughn," the mailroom clerk came to his desk with a package in hand, "You've got mail."

Vaughn glanced up from his paperwork at the pimply, late-teen man-child who was interning with them for the summer to do deliveries and sorting. The kid was earnest, excited to work there. He was basically the antithesis of himself, Vaughn observed.

"Thanks, Jimmy," he said, taking the brown envelope. It was fairly heavy. "You got any plans for the weekend?"

"Yeah, I think me and my girlfriend are gonna drive up to Santa Barbara and check out the coast, I heard it's pretty cool up around there," Jimmy nodded, affirming the plan to himself.

"Actually, it's not," Vaughn felt only a trace of shame at squashing the kid's expectations. He had proposed her in Santa Barbara. He would never go back.

"Oh," Jimmy looked at the floor. "Um, alright, well—have a good weekend, OK?"

"Thanks," Vaughn said, lifting the package towards Jimmy's receding back.

He slit the flap of the padded envelope with a sandalwood letter opener and drew out a hard cover book.

The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje.

There was something marking one of the pages; he opened it to that page and there, over a paragraph, was her wedding band.

His heart skipped a beat when he saw it, saw how small it was. Were her fingers really that slender? He traced the circle under the Scotch tape—the tape was old, it had that smell, that adhesive odor that old tape gets—and tried to remember what it looked like on her finger. He had no idea where she was.

He peeled the corner of the tape up and glanced around to make sure no one was watching him. He read:

_July 1936. _

_There are betrayals in war that are childlike compared to our human betrayals during peace. The new lover enters the habits of the other. Things are smashed, revealed in a new light. This is done with nervous or tender sentences, although the heart is an organ of fire. _

_A love story is not about those who lose their heart, but those who find that sullen inhabitant who, when it is stumbled upon, means the body can fool no one, can fool nothing—not the wisdom of sleep or the habit of social graces. It is a consuming of oneself and the past. _

He stood abruptly and threw the book in the trash, ring and all.

"Mike, are you ok?" Weiss looked up from pecking out an ops report across the desk at him.

"Yeah, I'll be back in awhile," Vaughn muttered, stuffing his keys in his pocket.

"Alright," Weiss went back to work. Vaughn needed help, he decided.

Vaughn drove to the nearest Chinese place that no one from work would be at. Well, really, no one should be anywhere but work, since it was 3:30 in the afternoon. He sat down at the bar and looked around at the dive he'd picked out. Outside, the building was a low, green metal building, like a hangar, but inside was decorated to look like some kind of cave. At least, he guessed it was a cave. The carpet was blood red, the walls were plastered to look like rock, but painted white. The bar was decorated with red paper lanterns from Tsingtao beer company, red leatherette booths and chairs, gold-flecked Formica on the bar counter. A fountain recycled stale-smelling water through a concrete Buddha's mouth, over some rocks that had a considerable coating of algae.

"You need drink?" the man behind the bar asked, looking Vaughn up and down.

"Yeah," Vaughn said, "You have Sapporo?"

"Sure, sure, coming right up," the man dug in a mini-fridge near his knees. "You wanna large or a small?"

"A large," Vaughn replied without thinking.

"You look like you need large," the man nodded. "You have a fight with the missus?"

Vaughn just nodded. He really didn't want to talk to this guy. He didn't know why he kept wearing his wedding ring. "Yeah," he said finally, and threw a ten dollar bill on the counter. "Keep the change."

"You wanna fortune cookie?" the man asked. "Kitchen's closed, but we gotta fortune cookies."

Before Vaughn could respond, the man placed one in front of him.

"_I killed a man," she told him, "Someone I cared about." It was obvious how much it bothered her. _

"_Noah Hicks was an assassin," he pointed out, logically, "If you hadn't killed him, he would've killed you."_

"_Maybe," she frowned, "But I was the one who forced the fight." _

"_Hicks was a bad guy," he reiterated, mildly irritated that she was so conflicted over the issue. It seemed black-and-white to him. _

"_But the truth is, it affects me," her lower lip had started to tremble, "Never knowing who to trust… Learning to… _expect_ betrayal? Plotting in secrecy, and hatred, and anger? It's becoming a part of me."_

_He stared at her, not knowing what to say, if anything. Her knuckles were bruised to a dark purple and raw on the points where her tendons were just underneath her skin. _

"_I am becoming what I despise," she realized. "I tell myself that got into this to bring Danny's killers to justice, but the truth is? I'm more interested in revenge." _

_He just looked at her. _

"_I thought I could stay in control, but… it's just gotten so twisted.__i__" _

Taking a large swig of the beer, Vaughn tore open the wrapper and shook the cookie out into his hand. He could feel that it wasn't fresh, that it would be soft. He wondered if the beer had been frozen and allowed to thaw. It was flat in a peculiar kind of way that belied some kind of mishandling in transport.

The little strip of paper was printed in light blue, unusual for a fortune, he thought.

_Learn Chinese_, one side read. _Watch- Shou-biao_.

_Watch,_ he wondered, _in what sense of the word, like the thing you wear on your wrist, or like the verb?_ Either way, it was creepy. His father's wristwatch had stopped the day Sydney had walked into the CIA. The Watch of Eternal Sydney Love.

He flipped it over and read his fortune: "Beware the fury of a patient man."

Lucky numbers: 1, 22, 33, 37, 38, 47.

He looked for a pattern in the numbers, knowing there was none, but unable to stop himself. He'd been an agent too long not to do it automatically.

He assigned meanings to them. One: just because, everything starts with one. Twenty-two: he'd been 22 when he graduated from college and been hired by the Agency. Thirty-three: the age he'd been when he'd married Sydney. Thirty-seven: he turned 37 next week. Thirty-eight: he couldn't think of a meaning for it. The age he'd be next year, with two failed marriages and a house in LA and no kids.

Forty-seven.

He wished to God the number 47 didn't even exist. What had Rambaldi seen in that number? He saw it everywhere now. It made him think of Sydney, of her picture on the missing page 47 of the Rambaldi manuscript.

The last time he'd seen her had been the evening she'd come home from Berlin and he'd confronted her about her infidelity. She had come home to collect her clothes, and then… He didn't know where she was. He knew, from the unexpected delivery, that she was with Sark.

He wondered which of them had sent the book. Sydney loved to read; she always complained that she didn't get enough time to read when she was working at the Agency. But the gesture seemed so… Sark, both in its obscurity and its blatant cruelty.

_Beware the fury of a patient man. _

Sark was patient. He had waited patiently in custody for two years, until Sydney escaped from the Covenant and walked back into their lives, long after Vaughn had given up hope of ever finding her, and had married Lauren. Sark had waited patiently another two and a half years after he had escaped from custody before reappearing. Vaughn was vaguely aware that there was music playing in the restaurant, but he didn't actively listen. It was just weird that it was pop music instead of the usual oriental-influenced muzak that Chinese places usually played.

_I remember _

_When we could sleep on stones_

_Now we lie together_

_In whispers and moans_

_When I was all messed up_

_And I heard opera in my head_

_Your love was a light bulb_

_Hanging over my bed_

_Baby, baby, baby—light my way__1_

_Well_, Vaughn thought, taking another drink of the curiously flat beer, _you can be patient too_.

_Beware the fury of a patient man._

_

* * *

_Songs:

1 "Ultraviolet (Light My Way)." Achtung, Baby. U2.

* * *

Episodes: 

i The Solution. Season 1, Episode 20. Written by John Eisendrath.

* * *

And that's all, folks! Thanks for all the reading and reviewing :) 


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